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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

Which is why I wouldn't be surprised if "Satoshi Nakamoto" turns out to be, not an individual, but a tightly-knit team of people, including BOTH professional coders who write software for a living AND computer scientists with strong academic backgrounds. Bitcoin is in my view too impressive an achievement to be the work of a single person working in isolation.

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From my experience truly visionary project never comes from a group of "talented" people but a single person who had a laser focused vision and did whatever possible to make that happen. Having a focused vision is what drives the brilliant solution, not some group of smart people who try to come to a consensus.

"... not some group of smart people who try to come to a consensus."

You mean like the IETF?

Yes, like IETF. Not discrediting their contribution. Organizations like those are needed, just like how a non-founder operator CEO can be beneficial once a startup takes off.

The problem I see is when in their supposed wisdom they discredit the potential contribution of some lone visionary. And this goes back to your original premise, with which I strongly agree. History shows that sometimes one highly skilled programmer working alone has accomplished things that teams of programmers could not.

IETF doesn't create the vision (and the results are embarrassing when they try); it standardizes stuff (and lets people add tons of optional complexity) after the initial prototype is done. IEEE and ECMA have similar attitudes while ISO seems to do more design-by-committee.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7282 http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/24.pdf

"Rough consensus and running code"

> too impressive an achievement to be the work of a single person working in isolation.

It's been done before... for example, djb

Could you explain what his accomplishment was in terms a non-cryptographer could understand?

First of all djb is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein and the accomplishment was releasing a secure email server (qmail), a secure webserver (publicfile), and a secure BIND server (djbdns). Both qmail and djbdns became widely used, and the main alternatives were projects supported by large teams.

It took 8 years before the first bug was found in these projects.

I highly recommend reading through the guidelines in https://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html for how to write secure software. In particular point 5, Don't Parse, is broadly applicable and under appreciated. A well-known class of bugs arising from this error are SQL injection attacks.

Wow, this was a path I did not expect this conversation to take. Thank you for mentioning this.

Or Linus and Linux?

I think it's very hard for a group of people to coordinate behind a pseudonym that's so high profile.

It's hard to tell though. It may well be a single person who was inspired by multiple people's work and ideas. I like to compare works of single individual work is with how amazing Lord of the Rings is. I'm impressed it took a single person to write the whole thing.

Careful analysis of the source code might offer some clues regarding whether it's the handiwork of a person or a group.

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