There is zero chance that a whole team and management above them would have been able to keep this secret for this long with this much attention on it. And there is no reason to believe a single person could not do the things Satoshi did.
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.
It's unlikely a large dev team would be able to keep this secret. The code was also very consistent and not that large of a code base. It reads to me very much like a single person wrote it.
We definitely use a mix of US/UK spellings in Canada. This gets further reinforced when you work a lot with a particular spelling (eg. we use spell 'colour' with the 'u' but every graphics library / css / etc use 'color' so its a toss up on which one I actually type)
Or, a person that was born in the US and educated in the UK, big into cryptography and the cipherpunk mailing list and often mixed up spellings on social media.. like I dunno, Len Sassaman.
There were plenty of other oddities.. like the skeleton for a poker game in the code? Maybe a test for the digital currency? Maybe underlying motivation? Maybe... who knows.
No it wasn't-- it was highly portable. (unless you are just referring to the hungarian notation variable names, which is by no means unique to windows).
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.
I disagree somewhat. I don't think it was that messy. It wasn't the most modern C++ code but it was written by an experienced programmer and IMO not likely an academic. Most academics would be likely to code for a Mac or UNIX environment while commercial coders would be more likely to work in Windows.
Why not? AFAIK, the wallets that are supposed to belong to him have not been touched in a long time. Based on the industry he created, he likely would be a candidate for the Nobel prize in economics.
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.
Are people assuming? Or are they just not speculating about cardinality and sticking to the identifier they have? Would you expect people in the DC universe who don't know about Bruce Wayne refer to sightings as batmen? They can't know!
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.
It certainly wasn't clear if what they did would be considered legal or not by all locales. And if the project was successful you wouldn't want to make yourself a potential target. There isn't really much advantage to being famous.
The metadata of how Satoshi operated suggests living in Europe at the time.
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.
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.