One person could do it - but along with coming up with the exact solution to the global view problem, did they?
Moreover is Szabo such a good programmer that Dan Kaminskey's auditing of the code for security holes would have caused him to say that he's never seen a programmer so good? That every likely bug was already found and plugged fairly early on?
Whoever programmed BitCoin didn't write the prettiest code in the world, but it was very good, and certainly good enough code to be written by someone who spends a ton of time programming. Nick Szabo seems to spend a lot of his time on other things not related to programming.
What makes me think it wasn't Finney was that Finney was one of the two first people to respond to Satoshi when the paper was dropped on the cryptography mailing list. There is extensive back and forth between Donald, Finney and Satoshi, mostly Finney and Donald critiquing the whitepaper and Satoshi defending it.
Of course that would be the perfect thing to do if you were trying to draw attention away from yourself.
Btw, Hal Finney was diagnosed around 2009 with ALS (in his words, in reality it could have been earlier) which is a plausible reason for rushing source code out with unfinished market implementation and some silly bugs. Also, Hal's ALS progressed in 2011 and he retired: another reason for Satoshi to abandon the project as he (if he's Hal) could no longer support it secretly on his own.
Moreover is Szabo such a good programmer that Dan Kaminskey's auditing of the code for security holes would have caused him to say that he's never seen a programmer so good? That every likely bug was already found and plugged fairly early on?
Whoever programmed BitCoin didn't write the prettiest code in the world, but it was very good, and certainly good enough code to be written by someone who spends a ton of time programming. Nick Szabo seems to spend a lot of his time on other things not related to programming.
What makes me think it wasn't Finney was that Finney was one of the two first people to respond to Satoshi when the paper was dropped on the cryptography mailing list. There is extensive back and forth between Donald, Finney and Satoshi, mostly Finney and Donald critiquing the whitepaper and Satoshi defending it.
Of course that would be the perfect thing to do if you were trying to draw attention away from yourself.