There's nothing whatsoever about the code released for Bitcoin which is "not brilliant". It is concise, it escapes all of the normal vulnerabilities you would expect to find in code that has extensive network access, and absolutely anybody can jump into the repository and get a very solid understanding of what is going on for what was then a completely novel and unheard of system. It is tightly integrated for its purpose, but there was no necessity for it be anything else, and it enabled the code to be released when it was.

"Satoshi was a bad coder" has absolutely no basis in reality.

From http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-bi...

> It turns out that actually using the Bitcoin protocol is harder than I expected. As you will see, the protocol is a bit of a jumble: it uses big-endian numbers, little-endian numbers, fixed-length numbers, variable-length numbers, custom encodings, DER encoding, and a variety of cryptographic algorithms, seemingly arbitrarily. As a result, there's a lot of annoying manipulation to get data into the right format.

At least s/he should have made everything big-endian or little-endian.

Satoshi assembled something that works out of the primitives available, and that is party of the reason that it was able to be produced to begin with. Taken in isolation it is already of mind boggling complexity, and it had to be presented to people who didn't have any clue what a distributed consensus is even shaped like. Some hashes being in the wrong endianness, serializations being a bit funky are irrelevant in the larger picture.

Knowing that it isn't the place to make your own serialization for ECDSA signatures and just using what was available in OpenSSL is the hallmark of a great coder, else the project might never have been realized in the first place.

That's largely a result of relying on OpenSSL to build your shit.