If you want to understand Satoshi, I suggest downloading a copy of the original version of the Bitcoin protocol - i.e. before Gavin et al polished it up.

It's a strange piece of code. The style doesn't look at all like that of a commercial programmer. When I first read through it (late 2010), my initial impression was that it came from somebody who was self-taught, from one of the non-software communities that tend to write code - academic economists, physicists, maybe a manager at a bank. Definitely not a mainstream programmer.

The language of the inline comments made it clear that it was an American. I assumed at the time it was an expat living in Japan, possibly working for one of their big banks.

Whoever it was, they were highly idealistic (like extreme end of libertarian) and quite paranoid.