I will forever mark the name, Leah McGrath Goodman and Newsweek editorial staff in my mind as a toxic journalist and TMZ-styled publication after this event.
Granted, I don't think Leah McGrath Goodman and Newsweek did anything illegal by breaking this story. I don't think it's wrong for Goodman to attempt to contact Satoshi's relatives over the phone.
What really crossed the line for me was Leah McGrath Goodman and Newsweek's decision to post the photo of the house, with the car's plate info on it.
Why would you do this? What relavence if any did this have to the story?
Showing of the house with car license plate resulted in identifying his address really easily. Let's face it. She wouldn't have done this to Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos even though they are far more famous, rich and public. She did this to this guy only because he's reclusive and powerless.
He has a colorable claim but no chance of winning. The founder of a cryptocurrency which now boasts of a >$1 billion market is legitimately a matter of the public interest, even if it's not the right guy.
This principle has been established many times by people who were mistaken for criminal defendants (not always defendants with the same name), including the Boston U student who killed himself shortly before the Boston Marathon bombing.
"Legitimate public interest" is a defense to a tort. It is used by the publication to defend itself from an invasion of privacy claim. It can't be used by a plaintiff (except as a defense to a counterclaim by the defendant).
That's it, it's a slam dunk case Newsweek is liable for bajillions of dollars. He sure didn't act like a secretively paranoid inventor of bitcoin.
I bet newsweek would love to see his entire email history. He should probably sue them so he can see that email to the merchant and newsweek can read his entire email history, as well as subpoena various other people for their private emails with satoshi. This will be a winning legal strategy to protect his privacy.
Why are you discussing Leah's article when this article is discussing something completely different (the fact that Leah's article is wrong)?
You can go to the post of the Newsweek article and get a billion comments exactly like yours. It is pointless to keep harping about it in every related discussion...
You seem upset about this story, but as someone with no stake in Bitcorn or anything else related to this nonsense, I struggle to understand why you care so much who is outed as its creator?
My point was more that wealthy, powerful people often don't even have the sort of privacy being talked about, it doesn't make sense to complain that their wealth and power would protect them.
He has hundreds of millions of dollars in untraceable (if you know what you are doing) e-currency, protected only by keys presumably on his person, in his house, or otherwise nearby.
It's unfortunately not uncommon for strangers to be killed over a few thousand dollars cash. Apparently professional hit men charge only a little more than that.
Are you really suggesting that the worst he might endure is annoying reporters knocking at the door?
> having someone knock on his door, and having the police escort them off his property.
That's the worst that will happen to him.
Oh wait, people have reason to think he has est.~400 million in bitcoins. But it's okay, I'm sure he'll recover from this (https://xkcd.com/538/) kind of trauma, too.
Ok, I'm sorry but there are some serious inconsistencies here.
Leah McGrath Goodman said that after she asked him about BitCoin he promptly stopped emailing her. The timeline is unclear, but it seems like this was before Goodman contacted his family members. Why would she contact his family members if she was directly talking to him and they could blow her pretext of wanting to talk about model trains?
This strongly suggests that he knew enough about BitCoin to be chased away by the question. He uses English and American spellings, just like Satoshi's mailing list postings. He has a computer engineering background.
When she came to his house he said, verbatim, exactly what happened with BitCoin - "I'm not involved in that anymore." And something to the effect of "That's been handed over to others, I have no involvement with that anymore." This, if it was said, strongly suggests to me that this is in fact Satoshi.
Given that this would be catastrophe for both the journalist and Newsweek if it turned out to be wrong, and they must have seen some compelling evidence if they went forward with the story - I'm skeptical about Dorian Nakamoto's denial here.
I agree as much as one can. Unless there are outright fabrications in the Newsweek story, you really can not then start denying his role after he seemed to be admitting it. The chance of a random guy just admitting his role, being eccentric and really smart in this area and then later denying it -- and then not being the guy behind Bitcoin, seems implausible.
That said, if the guy wants his privacy, we can afford it to him, and if the only way to do that is to pretend he isn't the founder, so be it. So that is how I am going to interpret these denials and those agreeing with them.
Another possibility is that the Newsweek reporter was overly
convinced she was right, and ignored inconsistencies that disagreed with her premise. We don't have audio of the exchange where Dorian Nakamoto allegedly quasi-admitted to being involved in Bitcoin. I could be wrong, of course, but misquotes do happen.
My theory: Dorian thought the reporter was asking him about his past at the defense contractor. Doing work for a defense contractor sometimes gets you crap, so maybe he was trying to distance himself from that, like, "No, I used to work for a company that did potentially evil for the government, I'm no longer involved with it". I know some people who did work for defense, and they're not very open about it.
The reason why he thought the reporter was asking about his work at a defense contractor vs. bitcoin? Plain ole' miscommunication... Leah perhaps presented herself in an unconfident, possibly suspicious manner like she's out to get him and the guy's like "nope, not gonna get into this". And to be fair, English is this guy's second language.
Lance Armstrong and the members of the US Postal Service team denied using performance-enhancing drugs for more than a decade before finally confessing.
JK Rowling denied writing the Cuckoo's Calling for months.
The Duke Lacrosse Stripper changed her story at least a dozen times before finally admitted nothing happened.
JJ Abrams claimed that Star Trek Into Darkness wouldn't be about Khan for months.
IOW, unsupported denials mean nothing. The Newsweek story may not be right, but it at least has compelling supporting evidence that it could be right.
(There are more examples; these are just the ones I remembered off the top of my head.)
JK Rowling never denied writing the Cuckoo's Calling. When The Sunday Times broke the news on July 14, 2013[1], she said “We can confirm the story in The Sunday Times was correct, and it was not a leak or elaborate marketing campaign to boost sales. It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation, and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name.”[2]
Those quotes are extremely suggestive that he was indeed involved in Bitcoin--so suggestive that it's clear that either they are fabricated or he is not being truthful in the newer interviews.
If you are skeptical of Dorian's denial then you have to wonder why would he first suggest to Newsweek that he was involved with it and then later clarify to AP that it was a misunderstanding.
But there isn't any good explanation of why he would later deny it unless it really was a misunderstanding in the first place.
> This strongly suggests that he knew enough about BitCoin to be chased away by the question.
No it does not. Not understanding why a reporter out of nowhere would contact him, he thought that "Bitcom" was one of the confidential engineering projects that he was previously involved in. Which he could not discuss under NDA.
Add to that the ambitions of a reporter looking to score a cover story for her magazine's "relaunch of its print edition after 15 months and reorganization under new ownership".
Let's not forget that Newsweek has changed hands recently and has published at least one provably false story since then. They are relaunching their print version tomorrow, and even if they are wrong everyone is talking about them. There isn't any compelling evidence provided in the article just circumstantial.
Textbook case of repulsively inane "journalism". Newsweek senior writer Leah McGrath Goodman was assigned the task to write a juicy story by outing the Bitcoin inventor. Here's how she went about it, as a diligent professional: starting from the assumption that Satoshi Nakamoto was literally his real name, she went scouring a database that contained the registration cards of naturalized U.S. citizens (for the record, Nakamoto is the ~400th most common Japanese name).
A Satoshi Nakamoto then turned up whose profile and background offered a potential match (as he used to be an engineering contractor and had shown libertarian views in the past), if you were willing to ignore a lot of facts (such as his less-than-native mastery of English). She then interviewed the man's family, fabricated a few quotes implying involvement with Bitcoin, and published a clickbait story destroying the man's privacy.
Well at least, Dorian Nakamoto got a free lunch out of it.
Hypothetically speaking, if I were both Batman and Bruce Wayne and someone outed me as Batman, of course I would say, as Bruce Wayne, "I am not Batman."
This could well be the case. I've seen it happen before including in newsrooms I've worked in: A reporter feels too confident in her story and starts to ignore contrary evidence. Her editors don't perform sufficient independent verification. Everyone is caught up in having an exclusive. In this case it coincides with the magazine's relaunch, ratcheting up the pressure still more.
Also you might have a bunch of English major editors saying FAA engineer == computer engineer with significant cryptocurrency domain expertise. It's all the same, amiright?
Cryptography is learnable by anybody. Maybe not practiced up to state-of-the-art standards by just anybody, but to say that's unreachable is bad form. I'm an art major turned software developer who has been reading about cryptography and paying astute attention to cryptography articles here (as well as trying to objectively gauge the comments), for the better part of the last half-year. I'm not saying I'm good at it, but to say that I can't comprehend a hash function, padding oracle attacks and public-key cryptography is pretty dumb. The beautiful thing about cryptography is that, theoretically it's nice and simple - the less moving parts that add up to the more robust system, the better. The problem lies in real-world implementations, as it always does with theoretical -> real systems. If I, as a liberal arts major with only a few years of practical software (and thus tangential computer subsystems of hardware) experience can grok the basics no problem, then surely an electrical engineer with years of practical experience can understand it too. Creativity knows no bounds - sometimes the right circumstances and accidents lead to an idea that actually makes perfect sense.
Yep, that's largely true, though I'd say there's a very very big difference between understanding hash functions and public-key crypto and designing, coding, debugging, and deploying a system like Bitcoin.
The number of people who could do the former would be pretty much every freshman CS student who took the relevant classes. The number of people who could do the latter is a far smaller fraction.
In any case, the burden on proof here is on Newsweek. I don't believe, given the evidence we have, that they've met it. Strong claims require strong proof.
I agree with what you're saying completely. Sometimes people like to think intellectual pursuits are only for the highly intellectual, instead of those that happen to be interested with a different mindset than those in the upper tax brackets of IQ.
Hear here! I think there's something profound here. Not to put words in your mouth in what follows, of course.
As a physicist, I'm really tired of the attitude that some things are just too complicated for the "common man" to understand, and I can easily see how crypography is similar with respect to public perception. This idea that "not everyone can understand" is propaganda put forward by the most intellectually insecure among us, and it does us damage in the long run.
Inevitably, someone comes by that sells the public a load of snake oil under the cover of being "too complicated". When they're eventually proven wrong, public trust erodes. Eventually, the very idea that expertise exists is in jeopardy.
Thank you for calling out the bullshit, even though you might not have meant it as such. These "technical" topics are open and understandable by everyone that cares, and I'm convinced that anyone who suggests otherwise is not worth their salt.
(edit: No offense intended whatsoever to declan. This is just something I've been meaning to get off my chest for a while and bennyg just reminded me of it.)
Man says X, later claims not X. Bitcoin enthusiasts declare total victory for not X, call for tar and feathering of company that published X.
No harm in giving this some time and seeing if "Man Denies He's Bitcoin Founder" turns out to filed next to[1] "Man Denies Connection to Olympic Bombing" or next to "OJ Announces Search For Real Killers".
[1] pedantry disclaimer: not meant as perfect analogies
Gonna file your comment under "Bitcoin enthusiasts declare total victory for not X"
On what planet is this not evidence:
"Newsweek writer Leah McGrath Goodman, who spent two months researching the story, told the AP: "I stand completely by my exchange with Mr. Nakamoto. There was no confusion whatsoever about the context of our conversation -- and his acknowledgment of his involvement in Bitcoin."
An audio recording is evidence. What you quoted back to me is the possibly flawed recollection of a reporter who's in the unenviable position of defending a very high-profile cover story used to relaunch a national magazine. That reporter is no longer a disinterested observer. The AP, to a first approximation, is.
First, we're not in a courtroom with the witness under oath. Second, because we're not, we can't cross-examine the witness. Third, even if we could and her recollection is as you say, the balance of evidence would remain heavily tilted against Dorian == Satoshi. Sorry. :)
According to the Newsweek article this Satoshi Nakamoto:
1. Dropped all contact with the reporter when the topic of Bitcoin was brought up over email.
2. Called the cops when the reporter went to his house to ask him about Bitcoin.
3. Said to the reporter: "I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it," "It's been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection."
Someone here is lying, because a person who only heard of Bitcoin three weeks ago doesn't do and say those things.
1. Dropped all contact when it was clear the person had misrepresented themselves and thought he was Satoshi.
2. Called the cops when this stranger came to his home to persist in this line of questioning.
3. Reporter says he said this, but also the cop just happens to be familiar with bitcoin and quip something appropriate. It could easily be a paraphrase of this man saying he's no longer involved in the govt projects we know him to be involved in, and he has no connection with them.
Why didn't the reporter record this exchange? Seems elementary when you're ambushing the guy. And has no one contacted the cop involved to see what he said or knows?
It makes me wonder how many people saw "Satoshi Nakamoto" and tried to talk to this guy before the reporter. Surely she wasn't the first. People have been wondering about the identity for years.
Based on other investigative efforts people have undertaken, the kind of level of complexity Bitcoin has in its underlying code-base shows that there might have been more than one person responsible for Bitcoin. It's unfortunate this has happened to a guy who is not related to Bitcoin at all. Pictures of his house, location, his full name and even going as far as documenting that he's between in and out of jobs over the years was uncalled for in my opinion.
Do editors and journalists not read what is being published? Feels like we've all been transformed back 7 to 10 years ago where this kind of "investigative journalism" was prevalent and hardly investigative at all. NewsWeek either need to put up some conclusive proof or retract everything they've said and give mr Satoshi an apology.
It'll be interesting if from a legal perspective Dorian Satoshi has a case against NewsWeek considering this has already gone to print. If it causes Satoshi's life to crumble, make it hard for him to get employment, subjects him to harassment from armchair Internet investigators and whatnot, he might have some kind of case. But having said that, this would mean if it went to court, he would have to offer up access to info that NewsWeek and others don't have and if he is the real Satoshi, it would come back to bite him.
The real question is, if this is the real Satoshi, why isn't he using his incredible stash of Bitcoin to live a little more comfortably? Hiding in plain sight perhaps. Just let the poor guy be. Nobody should be subject to this kind of speculative journalism. It's the Boston bombing situation all over again.
The new Satoshi Nakamoto communication is really interesting. There have been quite a lot of stories over time supposedly identifying the real Nakamoto, and there was complete silence over this.
So... did Newsweek get the real Nakamoto who is panicking now? Or did they get the wrong guy, and the real guy feels like this time (rather than those previous times) he has to step in to protect the innocent?
It is a rather interesting situation. Especially when you take into consideration how quickly the real Satoshi Nakamoto issued the statement saying he wasn't Dorian Nakamoto when this isn't exactly the first story to come out supposedly identifying the man behind the mask of Bitcoin. The statement was also issued rather quickly, but I can see why though in a non-conspiracy kind of way.
The man being targeted by NewsWeek is old and just because he says he's not the real Satoshi won't stop conspiracy nut jobs from stalking him and trying to find out the truth. Pictures of his home and location, children's photos and names have been plastered all over the Internet, I really feel for the guy even if he is the real Satoshi.
This whole situation highlights while the real Satoshi will probably never come out of secrecy if this situation is anything to go by. Not only that, but given NSA's extensive surveillance program, he would no doubt be subjected to more focused observation than others.
NewsWeek either need to put up some conclusive proof or
retract everything they've said and give mr Satoshi an apology.
This has been my problem since the story broke. It's just like a good conspiracy theory; the circumstances are all there to make the conclusion possible, even plausible. But there's not enough there that would hold up in a court of law.
Man, it's a good thing HN didn't fly off the handle and start obsessing over this man and try to invade his privacy using the excuse that NewsWeek started it and that makes it okay.
That was not my impression of the HN comments in the least. Most HN commenters seemed to think it was an egregious invasion of his privacy from what I read.
This was an egregious invasion of his privacy! Look, these postings from years ago on various message boards don't match his writing style -- these Amazon reviews don't match the style either -- his INS form doesn't match the timeline as close as expected -- From the streetview of his house, it doesn't look like the house of a hundred-millionaire -- this transaction made 3 years ago to buy juice in New York is off too -- I can't believe Newsweek invaded his privacy!
There was a separate post where a small business owner in New York claimed to have met the man in 2011 when he made a purchase at his store. People then started demanding the transaction ID so they could try to track down his wallet.
It was filled with claims that it's not doxxing because NewsWeek posted his address already, that Bitcoin users should have no expectation of anonymity, it could have huge ramifications to the economics of Bitcoin as a whole, etc.
> People then started demanding the transaction ID so they could try to track down his wallet.
All of the top comments in that thread[0] specifically asked not to publish the transaction id, but some people just want to interpret things the way they want to interpret things.
Libel? Slander? Where's the suit? If this guy actually is Satoshi the last thing in the world he wants is to be on a witness stand.
Opening a case against Newsweek lets them subpoena all sorts of records that they aren't entitled to with out a case, primarily because the truth is a defence to slander / libel, and if this guy loses then he's forever Satoshi.
Also it's going to be pretty difficult to prove that he suffered damages from the article.
>Also it's going to be pretty difficult to prove that he suffered damages from the article.
It depends on what the fallout from it is, in terms of internet attention. If he's not "the real Satoshi" and he starts getting harassed because of this article, I'd say he has a pretty decent case: If the statement "is false, caused harm, and was made without adequate research", then most non-celebrity citizens have a pretty strong case.
Key excerpt:
He also said a key portion of the piece — where he is quoted telling the reporter on his doorstep before two police officers, "I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it" — was misunderstood.
Nakamoto said he is a native of Beppu, Japan who came to the U.S. when he was 10. He speaks both English and Japanese, but his English isn't flawless. Asked if he said the quote, Nakamoto responded, "no."
"I'm saying I'm no longer in engineering. That's it," he said of the exchange. "And even if I was, when we get hired, you have to sign this document, contract saying you will not reveal anything we divulge during and after employment. So that's what I implied."
I do not believe him. There are just too many coincidences there. This is not a common name. What are the chances you find someone that has the math and engineering knowledge to create bitcoin and has not been busy with anything else during the relevant period among the "several" people that newsweek found having that name in the entire world.
He is probably scared for his life and scared for the safety of his family. And it might be with good reason. So I am not going to bother him or anything, but lets be honest: he is probably the guy.
I think the bitcoin community will help him regain his anonymity. It is in their interest that the mystery of Satoshi survives. I am sure he is a great person but the face of Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto just does not seem to inspire billion dollar valuations.
It would be very difficult to rob Bill Gates or Warren Buffet and get away with it. Their money is mostly in the records of various banks, brokerage houses, corporations etc. It would be very difficult to steal that without being immediately traced.
It seems much easier to steal bitcoin. None of the significant bitcoin thieves have been caught thus far, and we are talking large sums being stolen.
Regarding his name being uncommon, I have to admit, I know little of Japanese names or how common they are. I trusted the Newsweek article which suggested the name was very uncommon and they also kind of suggested that they checked all the Satoshi Nakamotos they could find on record. But of course they may be wrong.
It's not a very good metaphor at all, especially when the story first appeared online, and was (edit: possibly)debunked by a massive news corporation that has been in print for decades. If it turns out this guy isn't Satoshi, it's just plain good reporting by the AP. As for Newsweek, that would be it, I think. They'd be a laughing stock.
I'm reminded of the time the AP said that a Boston U student (who we now know had been dead for several weeks) was the likely suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing, blindly regurgitating the rumors on reddit.
It turns out they were wrong about something far worse than claiming that some guy created Bitcoin. And yet, the AP is still around today...and is now being cited by the tech community as a paragon of journalism.
Can you link to a source regarding your claim that the AP wrongly implicated Sunil Tripathi in the Boston Marathon bombings? I couldn't find anything on Google, either by searching the entire internet or just ap.org.
The original article claims of an encounter with Satoshi with the police present that mention he handed Bitcoin off. Wouldn't it make sense for Leah to get that officer to go on public record corroborating her story? Or can officers not do that?
Oh, sorry. Wire services often will update their stories multiple times, especially if the news is timely. That gives their subscribers (especially newspapers with early print deadlines) something to work with, and the promise of more later. It also can carry bragging rights, important in inter-newsroom rivalries, about being first to publish.
I've worked in newsrooms with direct AP feeds and I've seen as many as a dozen writethrus with major AP stories. On the internal feeds, at least, they're marked with version numbers and a terse explanation of what changed.
I'm mildly surprised that AP hasn't published a writethru on their own website. It's been over an hour. Perhaps they have on their direct feeds, not sure.
What about the article that was posted earlier today about the shop keeper who had this Satoshi visit his store and spend bitcoins? If that was true then it would breach this guys claim that he only learnt about bitcoin three weeks ago.
The shop keeper on the other side of the country that once had an Asian man come in about three years ago and buy two crepes without giving his name or letting his photo be taken?
Readers who believe Dorian != Satoshi: What would you have to see to convince you that Dorian == Satoshi?
Readers who believe Dorian == Satoshi: What would you have to see to convince you that Dorian != Satoshi?
The hallmark of a good belief system is that your beliefs are falsifiable -- there exists some hypothetical set of experiments which could return unexpected results that would make you change your beliefs.
This guy, whoever he is, is definitely one step ahead of the rest of us.
Anyone with a modicum of intelligence would know that it's effectively impossible to remain truly anonymous in this day and age. So what do you do if you want to be left alone? Either you make sure you have enough "insurance" that no one would risk messing with you, or you play the system against itself: leak just enough information to lead people down your trail but not so much that the trail can't equally plausibly be denied. It's all rather reminiscent of Vinnie "The Chin" Gigante's decades-long ruse of feigned insanity to avoid prosecution.
Side note: I think the last high-profile anonymous figure that managed to remain truly anonymous for any length of time was "Deep Throat", and he did all of his talking pre-internet.
This is strange ... Really ... But I thought I'd say, have you ever thought that some people may have succeeded in being "anonymous" or hidden by the simple that you have not heard of them?
I've used anonymous sources in many articles. All were published in the Internet era. Not one of my sources was ever involuntarily outed, as far as I know.
I still claim that Satoshi Nakamoto is the NSA. Clearly this was one of their fall guys. Terrible people, the NSA, setting up innocent bystanders as scapegoats.
What is your story for the thought processes/internal processes at NSA that would have led to the creation of Bitcoin by them? I'm genuinely curious because it seems pretty out of character for an organization whose task is to protect the established elite to go out of their way to create something extremely creative that could endanger the established elite.
The plausibility depends a lot on the competence you anticipate from such processes. But such contradicting signals of competence are pretty typical of large organizations, especially ones that are silo-ed to some degree.
Imagine this: Dorian Nakamoto was a former DoD contractor working on classified project and was not Mr. Bitcoin.
A woman started (from his perspective) stalking him, emailing him under false pretenses, phoning him, calling his son, and then showing up at his house in person. He called the cops to keep this stalker (again, from his perspective) away from his house. She yelled some questions at him from a distance and he might have thought she was asking about DoD work. "No longer involved and cannot discuss" is a reasonable answer. As well as: Don't come back.
I knew I should be weary of the writer after this:
"Satoshi Nakamoto's 2008 online proposal also hints at his age, with the odd reference to "disk space" - something that hasn't been an issue since the last millennium"
1. Showing great concern for the small details, side cases, resource conservation is a timeless and ageless sign of a good programmer.
why are we up voting these threads? so someone posts this fancy story about the bitcoin founder he finally found, which for all we know could be false.
yet, we have nothing better to up vote than every major news outlets satoshi nakamoto story.
We are upvoting these threads because HN is subject to playing paparazzi as much as any teenage ditz and consequently devolving into a tabloid. This happens when John McAfee goes nuts in Brazil, too.
I don't think they meant video interview. I read somewhere else that he went to the AP offices and they talked for two hours. So interview in the sense of reporter talking to person.
It did seem a rather short article for that amount of talking.
AP almost certainly audio recorded it (at every news organization I've worked for it would be standard practice). But that doesn't mean they'll post the audio, or that there was video.
Granted, I don't think Leah McGrath Goodman and Newsweek did anything illegal by breaking this story. I don't think it's wrong for Goodman to attempt to contact Satoshi's relatives over the phone.
What really crossed the line for me was Leah McGrath Goodman and Newsweek's decision to post the photo of the house, with the car's plate info on it.
Why would you do this? What relavence if any did this have to the story?
Showing of the house with car license plate resulted in identifying his address really easily. Let's face it. She wouldn't have done this to Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos even though they are far more famous, rich and public. She did this to this guy only because he's reclusive and powerless.