Why do so many just assume he'd be a single real person?
Could be a whole dev team at a company (Twitter Inc. for example) or a government agency just as well.
Could be a whole dev team at a company (Twitter Inc. for example) or a government agency just as well.
Even a single person would have continued communication as Satoshi if they were able to, as their life's work became an incredible success. No, Satoshi was a single person who is no longer able to communicate because they are dead. And there are several good candidates who meet that description.
Personally I'm a fan of the "butler did it" theory, i.e. Hal Finney, who indeed died at the right time.
The other oddity in the code is that there is a mixture of US/UK spellings being used, which also suggests more than one person.
Oh, and the pizza thing is another myth, the real monetization was the liberty exchange setting up as market for $/bitcoin exchanges.
Not an oddity are all, it suggests a non-native speaker. US/UK spelling inconsistency is rather common unless you went to school in one of the two.
Maybe he is just canadian. We use a mix.
It looked nothing like academic C++. It was also very small. Some people accuse it for being "messy" because it was highly coupled and non-modular. But that would have been premature and would have increased the size and complexity dramatically. Its lack of modularity was mostly reasonable for its level of complexity, and had Satoshi tried to make it modular he probably would have created boundaries that would have needed to be thrown out later.
When I first got into Bitcoin I just read all the code. I know plenty of other people did too, that wouldn't have been half as reasonable had had been broken into a lot of parts with interfaces between them.
First time I read this word and there seem to be no positive results for it on Google.
I think it can safely be assumed that he is dead. Or that he is a person with very little interest in money and fame, which is possible but unlikely. Persons like Grigory Perelman are rare.
One thing that suggests a single author (but certainly no proof) is the continued secrecy: bigger group means higher probability of a leak (accidental as much as deliberate). In a way, the probability of an author group is sinking over time, because "unexposed for n years" and "unexposed for n+1 years" aren't the same observation.
However, a government agency with extreme competency and desire to keep their involvement secret could spoof this, as well as spoof looking like an individual.
But Occam's Razor pushes me to believe it was just a single dude who happened to get enough things right to produce an escape velocity money protocol.