Another post for chasing wide goose chasing!! However, I have a strong feeling, that Satoshi is not a single person, instead it is a group of programming masters who created this path-braking blockchain technology. I am not saying that Satoshi can't be a single person, but it's my feeling about the mystery of Satoshi.
It is an intriguing idea, but the only reasons for Satoshi to be a group are, in my mind, of "conspiracy" nature, in the sense that one would have created a group to "undermine the financial system" or something like that. It is not unthinkable that a government or an organization that is not happy with the financial system, or is not happy with the power and wealth that the financial system and the associated economy gives to, say, "western" states, would launch such an initiative. For instance, I could think of a country like North Korea to be motivated to have the financial system in the west crumble down ; or a terrorist organisation or something like that, if you see bitcoin as a poison pill to kill the western financial system and its economical wealth - and to hold a serious stash of the new system. It is not unthinkable that Japan sees this as the only way to get its debt problem lingering for 3 decades now, resolved. It would be ironic that they end up in the hands of the Chinese. It could be the Chinese government, realizing that the mining will end up concentrated in their country, and lay their hands on the financial instrument of the new world economic system.
But these are *motivations* for Satoshi to be a group: to have set up a task force to achieve something like that.
However, when you look at the actual creative work done to make bitcoin, everything, in my mind, points to "a guy in his basement". After all, blasphemy as it may sound, bitcoin is not "the work of an absolute genius". I've seen, in several fields of science, *much more sophisticated work of genius* done by a single person. Works like Newton, Leibniz, Goedel, Einstein, Galois, Riemann, Witten, Feynman, Fermi, and the list is very long, are each, individually, much, much more sophisticated, involved, and more "stroke of genius" than bitcoin.
That said, there are bright ideas in bitcoin, but the important point is, in 2008, most of them were actually already laying on the table, and (failed but interesting) attempts at e-cash had already been done. When you look at the references of the Satoshi bitcoin paper, you find all these ideas, from the hash cash proof of work, to the kind of block chain to have a distributed time ordering, to the peer-to-peer network etc....
It just needed to be put together in the right order, and "have the idea". Now, a GROUP never has "the idea". That's always the insight of a single person. A group helps to have MANY ideas, or to work out MANY aspects of the solutions. But a group never has a bright insight: that's always the work of a single mind.
So it only needed ONE SINGLE MIND to put all the pieces of the puzzle, that were on the table since the last decade, together in one system. That's the brilliant idea of Satoshi. It only takes "a day" to get that idea, and "a week" to formalize it. Then, it could have been a group that programmed it, but as far as I heard, the code was not of very high quality. Most probably, a *single person* wrote that code, implementing, with some difficulties, the idea he had.
Now, of course, if a group wanted to hide that it was a group, it could of course MIMICK the somewhat "clumsy" work of an individual, that's true. So the fact that it *could* have been done by a single individual doesn't mean it has. It could be a single individual, as a mission for a group, and the group eliminated him when the mission was complete. Hard to say.
