"Is there any actual analysis to support the claim that it is an order of magnitude more complex than AWS crypto or Tarsnap?"
I don't think so, and I personally disagree with this statement.
As a developer, I find bitcoin 0.1.0's code easy to read and understand (I had requested a tarball of it about 2 years ago from one of the developers, as it was not in source control). And even the number of lines of code is not particularly impressive. Version 0.1.0 has only 13k lines of C++ code (excluding GUI code):
417 ./ui.h
720 ./uibase.h
1806 ./uibase.cpp
3228 ./ui.cpp
6171 total
For comparison, many HN readers who are talented developers would consider 5k LoC of C++ relatively easy to write in a span of 3-5 weeks, as a day job, for a small project that they have a precise idea how to implement. So 13k lines for a
project that apparently spanned a few months of Satoshi's time is absolutely plausible.
I may be wrong, but I thought Satoshi had been working on Bitcoin for 2 years before releasing anything. Granted he worked on the concepts and the white paper alongside the code.
I don't think so, and I personally disagree with this statement.
As a developer, I find bitcoin 0.1.0's code easy to read and understand (I had requested a tarball of it about 2 years ago from one of the developers, as it was not in source control). And even the number of lines of code is not particularly impressive. Version 0.1.0 has only 13k lines of C++ code (excluding GUI code):
Plus 6k lines of (boilerplate) GUI code: For comparison, many HN readers who are talented developers would consider 5k LoC of C++ relatively easy to write in a span of 3-5 weeks, as a day job, for a small project that they have a precise idea how to implement. So 13k lines for a project that apparently spanned a few months of Satoshi's time is absolutely plausible.I believe Bitcoin was written by one man.
Source: http://www.zorinaq.com/pub/bitcoin-0.1.0.tgz