Just read the white paper again, and this may have been noted by others, but just in case
The paper reads
We define an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures.
We consider the scenario of an attacker
We now consider how long the recipient
We have proposed a system
http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdfso unless a deliberate red herring, it is indicative of more than one person.
How long have you been working on this design Satoshi? It seems very well thought out, not the kind of thing you just sit down and code up without doing a lot of brainstorming and discussion on it first. Everyone has the obvious questions looking for holes in it but it is holding up well

Since 2007. At some point I became convinced there was a way to do this without any trust required at all and couldn't resist to keep thinking about it. Much more of the work was designing than coding.
Fortunately, so far all the issues raised have been things I previously considered and planned for.