Satoshi Nakamoto is a high IQ geek from the encryption and decryption club.
What kind of knowledge system does he have that can create Bitcoin?
Few years ago theymos made a post about Satoshi which he mentioned that. Satoshi wasn't a super genius. His great leap was to put different pieces together, creating something really new. But those pieces were well known when bitcoin was created.
The foundations of Bitcoin were set in stone 10 years ago today with the creation of the
genesis block, and Bitcoin version 0.1 was officially released a week later. Version 0.1 was amazingly complete, and even more impressively, it had very few bugs. It also had great forward-compatibility, with explicit support for future softforks in the form of the OP_NOPn opcodes. Before anyone knew how a decentralized cryptocurrency would even work, Satoshi was figuring out how to add to Bitcoin things like smart contracts and payment channels. This is incredible, and a lot of people look at Satoshi's amazing accomplishments with Bitcoin and say stuff like, "Satoshi must be a crypto super-genius, the next Einstein." This, I think, is very much missing the point.
When Satoshi was working on Bitcoin in 2007-2009, almost all of the core ideas of Bitcoin were well-known in the cryptography community. In 1996,
a summary of previous academic work on electronic cash was published, talking at length about most of the low-level cryptographic primitives used in Bitcoin and using familiar terms like "double spending". Hashcash proof-of-work was well-known, and I remember reading about it prior to Bitcoin as an idea to prevent email spam. git uses the same unbreakable chain of hashes as Bitcoin's block chain, and was first released in 2005. Satoshi made one major leap: combining all these pieces to prevent double spending through a PoW block chain. This was impressive, but the same flash of brilliance could've happened to anyone who was following this stuff.