Journalists want the scoop of the century - outing the real Satoshi. By back filling history, they gave exactly what they wanted, and they took it hook, line and sinker.
Except is that really the scoop of the century? Do people really care that much? If the media would just leave the real guy alone we could have the added benefit of preventing false self-marketing too. How about we just ignore all these "the real satoshi!" articles?
It's already in Wired, has 212 points on Hacker News, and who knows what value to people assessing him in academia or business sectors. Altogether, enough people care for it to matter to a tech egomaniac. Not "scoop of the century" or anything, though.
Yeah, it would be the scoop of the century to Bitcoin fans but few other people. That said, as someone who isn't involved at all, I love a good detective story. I'll read this.
Yep. That seems plausible. Given means, motive, and opportunity (including a few months of time), could some of the folks here on HN have backfilled history this way? Register an email address one character off of Satoshi's? Edit some old blog posts to insert Bitcoin references? Generate backdated GPG keys? Perhaps enough to satisfy not-very-technical journalists who won't think to compare coding styles and are too worried about losing a scoop to ask folks for second and third opinions?
I'd expect the real Satoshi to have more of a math background, not "ecommerce law" and "digital forensics." I'd also expect him to be more similar in writing style and be more ideologically in sync with Bitcoin in his public actions. Plus I'm not a C# coder but this looks pretty basic: https://digital-forensics.sans.org/blog/2009/04/24/code-skil...
The evidence the journalists published is more convincing if you want it to be convincing. My guess is that they did.
Awesome guerrilla marketing.
Journalists want the scoop of the century - outing the real Satoshi. By back filling history, they gave exactly what they wanted, and they took it hook, line and sinker.