Bitcoin wasn't anything extraordinarily revolutionary; it built upon others' work over decades of collaborative progress, and introduced few truly novel ideas. Very impressive work by all means, but it didn't require genius-level skill or knowledge.
Perhaps I am not as smart as I led myself to believe but the sound and words of the voice at the other end of the phone that called my then sff company job's tech support line (when IT jobs were more abundant) were way over my head.
With that being said, you are correct about "BTC being built upon others'" work over decades of collaborative progress, e.g. Hashcash (proof-of-work from 1997), B-money (1998), Bit Gold (1998), Adam Back's Hashcash, Wei Dai's b-money, Nick Szabo's Bit Gold, with the core tech involving public-key cryptography, Merkle trees, blockchain concept (from Haber/Stornetta 1991), etc. I used AI just to get a summary of previous tech BTC is based on.
Though I am a technical person, or at least that's what I tell myself, most of the above concepts and technology is beyond my reach. I would think somebody that knows that kind of stuff, either has a lot of time on their hands, has a lot of resources or has a lot of talented and technical friends.
But what do I know. I am just a "Brain Sturgeon" :)
It's common for older writers to insert two spaces after a full-stop. In fact, go through the cypherpunk mailing list (and many others) and you'll see it was the norm. As for Satoshi being British, he used predominantly British English but occasionally used American spellings and terms; it easily could've been intentional misdirection.
Adam Back doesn't write at all like Satoshi. Back's writings are filled with grammatical errors and he often makes spelling mistakes, which Satoshi seldom did.
The British English could be a misdirection. Satoshi was always quite inconsistent, sometimes using US spellings ('color', 'check', 'optimize'). One that always stood out to me was his use of 'gotten' – we don't typically use that word in British English, but an American English speaker attempting to disguise themselves as a Brit most likely wouldn't be aware of that fact.
> Among people who try to guess Satoshi's identity, there is also a surprising bias toward fame or at least well-known people.
Very true. Every time I see people seriously propose Elon Musk or Paul Le Roux or some other flashy/cool celebrity figure, I'm reminded that people are just attracted to spectacular stories and theories. Similar to how every missing persons case eventually has "trafficked by millionaires for sick satanic rituals" proposed as a theory.
I think Satoshi was probably a regular, older IT professional who developed an interest in digital cash, did some research, and familiarised himself (somewhat) with earlier proposals and discussions. People suggest he was a seasoned cypherpunk, but when he first began posting about Bitcoin to mailing lists, I seem to recall someone having to correct his formatting (I don't remember the specifics, and I wish I could find it, but it stood out to me at the time as suggesting unfamiliarity with mailing lists generally).
