Satoshi talked about using Bitcoin Core with Tor for more anonymity in some of his BTCTalk posts - I think I can recall that.
There was this thread (
Repost: Request: Make this anonymous?) where satoshi talks about Tor.
There is also this thread on P2Pfoundation (
http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-source) where satoshi talks briefly about the desire for great privacy.
I'm not hardcore, probably never will be, but I like most the users who quietly use it, don't get upset over how others use it
I quietly use bitcoin in my daily life at least every other day, but the slow creep of privacy invasion has made things more difficult on a number of occasions. I had previously used a merchant to buy some expensive electronics with bitcoin, and was planning to do so again, except they use BitPay as their payment processor and BitPay introduced KYC for buyers buying goods of over $3000. Out of the question. I had previously used localbitcoin to buy and sell between bitcoin and fiat, but they also introduced KYC, so I had to move to an alternative P2P exchange. I'd love to be able to use a bitcoin debit card so I can pay with bitcoin everywhere, but doing gives the issuer of the card the ability to not only monitor every purchase you make, but also to shut your card down if you make a purchase they don't agree with. So much for "without the need for trusted third parties".