How are developers still able to archive privacy and how do they really hedge against authorities if they really do.
Well, if you assume, that there is no privacy, and something can be traced end-to-end, then there are still some tricks, which you can use. For example: every connection in the classical Internet has IP addresses on both ends. In the past, it was obvious, that if you are connected anywhere, then you can easily trace everyone, based on that IP alone, because it was normal to have static IP.
Later, the reality changed a little bit in that matter, because we started running out of IPv4 addresses. Which means, that currently, you no longer have 1:1 mapping. If you have some IPv4 address, then it is usually shared by thousands of people, unless you rent some kind of server.
And guess what: even if everyone has some IP, then some privacy-focused networks were still created on top of that. One of those examples is Tor. The trick is quite simple: you allow other people to send valid network packages on your behalf. And if you form large enough network, then you can no longer identify each participant.
Another interesting observation is that you can extend this trick into other fields. For example: if people will start blacklisting Bitcoin addresses, then expect that more than one person will be hidden behind a single public key. Another example is social media accounts: you can have a lot of alternative accounts, but you can also have the opposite: one account, publishing posts, written by many different people.
Sometimes I wonder, just how anonymous can developers really be in recent times.
If you think about possible solutions, then there are more options, than you can imagine. There are great ideas, which are just not yet implemented. One of them is trustless computation, where even the server operator know nothing about the code, which is executed, because it is encrypted, and everything is computed "on the fly", like it is in neural networks (but, in contrast to AI models, the structure is well-known and easy to understand for the creator, it is just obfuscated for the outside world, including the party, which provide hardware resources, like servers).
measures that are in place today where non existent a decade ago
There are improvements on both sides. You have more surveillance than before, but you also have more tools to defend yourself. There are whole protocols for communication, like nostr, which were not available in Satoshi times.
Also, there is a lot of potential in Bitcoin itself. Even if you take only Satoshi's ideas, and nothing else, then you can easily note, that not all of them are implemented. There is still a lot of work, which is left for the future.
You decide how safe these places are.
