A single person wasn't behind it - you can look at David Chaum et al's. 1988 "Untraceable Electronic Cash" paper, Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor's 1992 paper on proof-of-work, Nick Szabo's bit gold and Wei Dai's B-money from 1998, etc. for work that led up to bitcoin. There is one big innovation in the paper, and that is that proof-of-work on a Merkle tree can be used to solve the double-spending problem. Proof-of-work wasn't new. Merkle trees weren't new (1979). Awareness of the double-spending problem wasn't new (Hal Finney wrote an article on it in 1993, but I doubt that was the first time anyone thought of it). Combining all three is certainly clever and innovative, but it's just one innovation, not years of directed work by a government-funded team.

Bitocin has been in the works since the 80's. There have been many papers trying to get to the point we are at now so you can say that bitcoin is just version 1.0. Other teams and people (cypherpunks) have been working on this for a while.

Even further. Bitcoin really stems from Merkle Trees which were patented in 1979 [1]. But most of the ideas are present in Szabo's bitgold [2].

[1] https://www.google.com/patents/US4309569

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Szabo#Bit_gold

The most interesting conspiracy in my opinion is that it was created by the US government, to help people in third world countries fight financial censorship.

Tor, for example, was created by the US government to help fight censorship in dictorial countries as well.

“Satoshi Nakamoto”…

Samsung and Toshiba together makes —- Satoshi

Nakamichi and Motorola together makes —- Nakamoto

Seen this one before on reddit somewhere.

Satoshi is a regular Japanese name - don’t think it a portamanteu (ex. Director Satoshi Kon)

Except Samsung is Korean, not Japanese. Hmm, it must be... SANRIO!

It was announced at the depths of the financial crisis, October 2008, when cornerstone institutions were declaring bankrupcy every weekend.

It was running by January.

Equation Group.

I think NSA would have foreseen the inevitability of FPGA and ASIC miners and chosen a better proof-of-work function than SHA-2.

also the equation group already released an earlier paper on cryptographic currencies

Why these two governments in particular?

Technical ability, motive against USD. Lean more towards Iran than Israel. Who knows! Just a guess. I personally dont think it could have been an individual without help.

It's one logical leap based on well known crypto, algorithms, and cypherpunk literature. Honestly that has more of the hallmarks of a single actor than a state to me. But it's all idle speculation anyway :)