Mass adoption of Bitcoin would be a mass surveillance dream due to the lack of on-chain privacy. It also won't be censorship resistant without privacy.
Still not too late for Bitcoin to add serious on-chain privacy via encryption rather than obfuscation, but it's getting there.
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bitcoin won't just magically add privacy. you want something added to bitcoin, open a pr. its open source software.
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People submitting high quality pull requests implementing protocol changes isn't how Bitcoin works at this point. In the early years? Sure.
Solving it is almost entirely a political issue, not a technical one. Zcash already made the technology needed to deploy this for Bitcoin.
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There was just a soft fork last year to add support for Schnorr signatures. Why couldn't a PR to add Zcash-like encryption follow a similar path to get merged and activated in bitcoin?
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I mean, if it won't get in with a high quality PR, what do you think it would actually take to get it in?
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An outsider submitting a new protocol feature with a high quality PR and then having that get reviewed and then accepted by a few other developers is really not how Bitcoin works in 2022...
Can still happen for implementation-specific Lightning extensions but not Bitcoin itself.
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I don't think you seriously believe that someone can simply submit a very high quality working on-chain privacy implementation to Bitcoin Core and have that get reviewed or accepted. It would take them years of wrangling with politics and getting many people on board with it.
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The first step to making a significant protocol extension is definitely not implementing something and submitting a pull request.
Do you think Taproot, a dramatically smaller and less controversial change, was done that way? No, it has years of discussions, planning, etc. first.
Took years of people willing to deal with not just code but playing politics and getting not just developer consensus but community consensus for not just the concept but a specific approach and implementation once that was created. Is it everything planned? Not even close.
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In a few more years, another round of improvements may land with the low-level tooling needed to build more efficient decentralized mixing services, etc. That wouldn't be strong privacy with encryption.
It will only get harder to make protocol changes, especially larger ones.
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Thanks for clarifying what you meant. Yes I agree with all that. If the (human-)consensus-building groundwork is laid and any technical objections are addressed I would think it highly likely that a high quality PR would eventually get merged. Big "if" for such a big change, tho.