My more down-to-earth idea is that Satoshi was a clever guy, but not a genius, who had some limited insight into monetary aspects, who had some, but limited, grasp on game theory (his talking about "honest nodes" and about "consensus" as something that the community would want - the dogma that is still propagated by most bitcoin maximalists, shows that he didn't understand the fundamentals of the emergent properties of non-colluding antagonists - or was lying through his teeth about it), had some notions of cryptography and fucked up other things (like the way too small nonce). He did do a great invention, the cryptographic block chain. He screwed up other aspects. I have a hard time believing that that was "genius" that "implanted this" on purpose to deceive his evil masters in the weapon of mass destruction they ordered him to make, so that it blows in his own face.
Bitcoin is far too amazing to be created by a clever guy. And to be able to pull it off as Satoshi did.
You've never accomplished a million user viral s/w project in your life, so you have no comprehension of the genius it required. And he got it right the very first time he attempted it, with no prior coding nor marketing experience.
But that sometimes makes me think it was an expert group, but then why does Nash refuse to talk about Bitcoin? Could it be that Nash knew of a secret group and was the secret consultant?. But Nash couldn't have trusted just anyone because his sanity could be questioned again if he ended up being exposed as working with some scam or what have you. They would have to have shown him credentials that he would trust.
And the game theory in Bitcoin is genius, can't be done by a clever person.
And ideal money was Nash's lifelong ambition. He wrote that if humanity can't learn to cooperate we would go extinct.
But as I said, that's an unfalsifiable claim, and hence can be true too. But I simply don't think that a smart guy like Nash would lend himself (at his age !) to such a game. He was bloody 80 years old in 2008.
Nash was working on crazy new ideas until his death.
And the coding and research for Bitcoin was started when Nash was in his 70s.
And too much of a mathematical genius to commit the simplistic errors that Satoshi made. (yes, yes, to deceive...).
What game theory or math theory errors are there in Bitcoin?
I see none.
You are referring to your pet peeve about conflating distribution with security, but it was genius because Bitcoin is designed to be a settlement layer, not other things you think it should be.