I sometimes wonder whether Satoshi was the pseudonym for one single person or for a group of people. Or maybe he was one person who initiated what we know today as Bitcoin but was helped for the most part by many programmers who wanted to build this kind of payment system.
the pseudonym was used by 1 person
satoshi got inspired to make digital money from the cypherpunks but never teamed up with them and never interacted with them as a team before releasing bitcoin..
IE when people like nick szabo, wei dai, adam back and such first heard about bitcoin(first contact). their conversations were never "oh yea that thing we teamed up on" it was all "this guy popped up and cited us in our paper and we said fine, no problem" like it was a surprise first contact
becasue they admitted they never heard of it before some were sceptical, some brushed it off as probably not going to work, some forgot about the first contact till years later, and some got intrigued and wanted to learn more about it for the first time.. all of which were after the first contact of the white paper release
and yes you if you care to look at all publicly released stuff easily available to find via google of the many sites that collated all early interactions, you too can read it all and come to the same conclusions
yes satoshi got inspired by many things but those things do not mean those cited actually wrote code for bitcoin pre january 2009
even hashcash didnt end up in core code, even hals rpow didnt.. yes inspired, but satoshi changed things and patched things together and used inspirations in a different way than the intended use of the inspired usecase.. and thats what made bitcoin so unique and un-thought of before.. hense why its an invention and not a copy of someones previous work