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Bitcoin is at least one order of magnitude more complex than Tarsnap, or the crypto used in v1 of the Amazon AWS API. We should have seen far more bugs of varying severities if it was a one man band.

Is there any actual analysis to support the claim that it is an order of magnitude more complex than AWS crypto or Tarsnap?

There have been numerous vulnerabilities in the software implementation[1], and there has been (arguably) at least two bug in the algorithm[2][3].

I'd note that both the AWS & Tarsnap problems were implementation bugs, not algorithmic problems. That is a much better record than both the Bittorrent implementation and algorithmic record.

That's impressive, but doesn't seem superhuman.

Bittorrent (which was the work of one person AFAIK), for example has had no real algorithmic changes to the core protocol since it was released[4], and it is much more widely used than Bitcoin. (Yes, I know about trackerless .torrents, but that's more the discovery mechanism than the core transport algorithm).

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu...

[2] http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/25954806/, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=822.msg9503#msg9503

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#The_fork_of_March_2013

[4] http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0003.html (note the change history are all clarifications)

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7 ./irc.h 71 ./headers.h 156 ./key.h 177 ./sha.h 182 ./market.h 201 ./base58.h 264 ./market.cpp 265 ./irc.cpp 373 ./util.cpp 399 ./util.h 420 ./db.h 498 ./bignum.h 554 ./sha.cpp 597 ./script.h 604 ./db.cpp 750 ./uint256.h 856 ./net.h 1020 ./net.cpp 1127 ./script.cpp 1151 ./serialize.h 1317 ./main.h 2660 ./main.cpp 13649 total