Re:Bitcoin in 2012: By the Numbers
by mrb on Wednesday January 02, 2013 @04:52AM
(#4995987)
I think it is quite probable that Bitcoin was written by a single person. It is not that complicated: block chain of merkle trees + signing transactions with public/private crypto + proof-of-work with hashing function + peer-to-peer networking. The first public release (0.1.0) was only 20k lines of code. Someone like Szabo, Wei Dai, or Hal Finney, who have each spent more than a decade thinking about and attempting to design decentralized currencies certainly have the expertise to design Bitcoin all by themselves.
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My admittedly vague feeling is there are so many balances in the system that it was likely reviewed by a larger group, having lengthy expert-level discussions in a non-public forum, before release.
I've heard the theory that it's a government think-tank project that in asome sense 'escaped', in that it was thrown out to see what happened and has thrived beyond expectations.