Given the frequency of these fraudulent or mistaken Satoshi identifications, it's probably time that someone puts together a simple, publicly visible procedure for verifying Satoshi's identity. Make a web-site, call it something like satoshi-test.com, and include a step-by-step procedure for journalists to follow. If they can't get their Satoshi claimant to complete the test, then they shouldn't write the story. If they ignore the test, then we should ignore their story.
Litecoin is one of the first altcoins of Bitcoin. It is a nearly identical fork of Bitcoin except with a few parameters changed. All of the following that I am about to discuss work identically on both, so I will just talk about Bitcoin for expediency.
Bitcoin is a digital currency that is based on cryptography, specifically public-key cryptography. The way you spend money through Bitcoin is by using a private key that only you have access to to sign a transaction that sends Bitcoin to someone else. The rest of the network validates that transaction using the corresponding public key and rejects it.
Satoshi Nakamoto wrote Bitcoin. He mined the first block and authored the first transaction. As a consequence of this, several public keys are known that are recorded right into the very beginning of the blockchain. So anyone claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto should be able to digitally sign a message to that effect with the private keys corresponding to the known public keys, either a transaction on the blockchain or a simple text message.
Anyone who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto but cannot digitally sign proof to that effect is not Satoshi Nakamoto. The first thing the real Nakamoto would do should he ever come out publicly (which is highly unlikely) would be to provide this incontrovertible proof. As the creator of Bitcoin, he more than anyone knows that you can't take this kind of stuff on faith; it has to be proven mathematically.
The linked post shows the creator of Litecoin demonstrating that he is in possession of the private key corresponding to the genesis block of the Litecoin blockchain. It's really that simple. He has a private key, and he's signed a message that anyone can verify.
The post is by Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin. He's demonstrating that he indeed controls Litecoin's genesis block (i.e. the first block in its blockchain). He's demonstrating a very simple, unequivocal way to prove that you own the genesis block. Anyone claiming to be Satoshi can easily prove it by similar means.
I'm pretty comfortable with the technical competence of a subset of tech journalists -- nikcub is one of them. Other fields often get fairly competent journalists; tech journalism deserves the same.
The key thing here isn't necessarily technical competence but skepticism, which is the thing journalists are supposed to be oversupplied with.
> Other fields often get fairly competent journalists;
That's... not really true, especially when it comes to stuff like Bitcoin, which even a lot of experts don't understand (remember, people in our field are still struggling to write CRUD web apps). Medicine, for example, has equally complicated areas (cancer, epidemiology). I can't speak from personal experience (I'm not an expert in that field) but I have friends who are medical researchers and they are equally frustrated with medical journalism.
Ultimately, what we need are people who are actual experts in fields to be writing about those fields for a general audience, and get rid of journalists who aren't experts.
One thing that medicine does better is regulation. With odd exceptions like abortion, regulation of how doctors do their jobs is managed by other doctors. I would love if that was how things were done in computer fields.
The thing about journalism is you don't need all of them to be good, or even the median or mean journalist to be good -- just the top few to be amazing.
I agree -- we need people who are actual experts in the field, but also good at communicating, when communicating about topics where expertise is valuable. There are some amazing war correspondent journalists who go into harm's way and have both shared experience and a reasonable background.
I like NPR, but what I like about them is usually that they ask a question and get out of the way so the expert can talk. That means that you hear what the expert wants to say on the topic, which is great. But the expert doesn't get to choose the topic, and unless they're particularly assertive, the expert usually doesn't tell us when the question isn't really relevant, or when a better question could be asked. They're great, and I agree about donating to NPR, but I think journalists who were actually experts in the fields they reported on would be able to do better.
Not necessarily. He can first transfer whatever amount is still in the address controlled by that key to another address and then publish the private key of the address that now has a balance of zero. What's the problem with that?
If someone spends the first block or any which is believed to be held by Satoshi would be noticed and the bitcoin market would panic. Satoshi is alive and spending their money!! Sell now!
Given the frequency of these fraudulent or mistaken Satoshi identifications, it's probably time that someone puts together a simple, publicly visible procedure for verifying Satoshi's identity. Make a web-site, call it something like satoshi-test.com, and include a step-by-step procedure for journalists to follow. If they can't get their Satoshi claimant to complete the test, then they shouldn't write the story. If they ignore the test, then we should ignore their story.