I may be wrong, but I don't think that being an amazing cryptographer is necessarily that lucrative of a career. Most of your options are going to be governmen

I may be wrong, but I don't think that being an amazing cryptographer is necessarily that lucrative of a career. Most of your options are going to be government employment (intelligence services/military) or working in academia. If bitcoin was a top secret government development then it's quite likely they would assign different people to different parts of the project with a minimal number of people overseeing the entire thing.