Surely there are thousands of people on Earth who had the required skill and knowledge at the time, probably much more. Hash cash and Merkle trees had been a th

Surely there are thousands of people on Earth who had the required skill and knowledge at the time, probably much more. Hash cash and Merkle trees had been a thing for a while. On the other hand, a comparatively smaller number of people seeks out the public stage in a way that makes them well known. Furthermore, I think what's easy to miss in hindsight is that somebody with that knowledge would certainly be asking themselves how such a thing as a Bitcoin could ever have value. Certainly I know that if I'd been thinking about digital money at the time, I would have rejected the idea of Bitcoin as obviously infeasible because why would it ever have value? Whatever the required properties are for somebody to actually believe that something like Bitcoin could take off, they are in the political/social/economic domain and therefore unlikely to correlate much with being known in the security community. And to top it all off, the mining arms-race inherent in Bitcoin requires an extreme amount of computing power. On the other hand, crypto researchers are always looking for protocols that are efficient to implement. In that sense, there is even an anti-correlation between being likely to invent Bitcoin and being well known in the security community. You could easily imagine a Torvalds-Tanenbaum-style argument happening in the early days of Bitcoin between the inventor of Bitcoin and, say, DJB. The parallel is actually kind of eery ;)