Yeah, it's entirely built on the idea that every transaction is known by everyone. I think Lance is a bit confused. Maybe he should look into Monero. The point of Bitcoin is to enable anyone to exchange value with anyone. And it does that very well. When the US justice department declared that credit card companies had to stop processing donations to wikileaks I could still donate through bitcoin.
I don't think they're confused, I think the vast majority of people involved in crypto or who are spectators of crypto are confused. I have repeatedly heard that crypto enables "anonymous" transactions for years.
Also he literally links the original paper, quoting the part where it talks about transactions being harder to trace. "without telling who the parties are".