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Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

nytimes.com

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Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

#491

Post by sigmoid10 »

IanCal wrote: post #458
armchairhacker wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s legal to publish anonymous patient data, doctors do it frequently e.g. in “case studies”. As long as it can’t be traced back to the patient I don’t see why they should care (I wouldn’t). And since it increases public knowledge (e.g. how to treat future patients) I think it’s not only ethical, but should be encouraged. Doxxing also increases public knowledge, but knowing who’s behind some online pseudonym is much…

Case studies are done with consent, typically. That’s pretty different.

In principle, anonymized case studies do not require consent and historically, they were often published without. Without personally identifiable information, this is and always has been 100% legal. But in modern practice, many journals acknowledge that making a case fully anonymous in the age of the internet might not even be possible without taking away everything noteworthy, so they require some form of consent nowadays.

Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

#492

Post by vintermann »

adastra22 wrote: post #461
vintermann wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not one of those who thinks it's Adam Back, I believe it's Szabo - which means of course that I find your anecdotes perfectly convincing :) And it seems also the thing you mention about taking money on bad terms should be independently verifiable, which the journalist writing this article should probably have checked. I have trouble believing Satoshi would pursue a venture capital startup founder life in his pers…

In 2014 I found myself having to explain the fundamental basis of bitcoin's economic model and Satoshi's contribution to ecash (that the value of proof-of-work is independent of the work it represents, something the cypherpunks consistently got wrong pre-bitcoin) to a non-comprehending Nick Szabo. It's not him.

Even if Nick Szabo didn't have anything to do with Bitcoin, I find it very unlikely that he wouldn't know about the core differences between his own system and Bitcoin by 2014.

That's a bit like a mathematician trying damn hard to prove something, proving it for most cases, and then be totally unaware of the proof six months later, relying on his own proof and proving it for all cases. That doesn't sound like it happens very often, especially not for heavily online academics.

Are you sure he wasn't just politely nodding along to the entrepreneur explaining his invention to him?

Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

#493

Post by sandos »

DeliciousSeaCow wrote: post #68
kgeist wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I read up to here, but I wasn't convinced that this is the revelation that the author claims The rest of the arguments is as weak: 1) both released open-source software 2) both don't like spam 3) both like using pseudonyms online 4) both love freedom 5) both are anti-copyright etc. Basically, the author found that Adam Back used the same words on X as Satoshi did in some emails (including such rare words as "dang,"…

It's weird they spent so much time on the written word similarities, when the biggest reveal here is that Back disappears off the email lists (on a topic he is VERY interested in and has historically corresponded on) when Nakamoto appears, and then comes back when Nakamoto disappears.

This is one of the few real clues in this article, I would say.

Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

#494

Post by armchairhacker »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #491
IanCal wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Case studies are done with consent, typically. That’s pretty different.

In principle, anonymized case studies do not require consent and historically, they were often published without. Without personally identifiable information, this is and always has been 100% legal. But in modern practice, many journals acknowledge that making a case fully anonymous in the age of the internet might not even be possible without taking away everything noteworthy, so they require some form of consent no…

Alternatively they can do what Scott Alexander did and change irrelevant details.

Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

#495

Post by sandos »

vidarh wrote: post #149
refulgentis wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need someone who read Back's obscure 1997-1999 cypherpunks posts about combining Hashcash and b-money, implemented exactly that system a decade later, independently came up with the same non-technical analogies and trivia, wrote with the same hyphenation errors, and then happened to be active during the exact window Back went silent. The more you flesh out the "someone who read Back" profile, the more it just sou…

Someone who has read his material would be likely to repeat the same analogies and trivia. As for the hyphen errors, they are common for people for whom English is their second language. I commit hyphen errors similar to what is described all the time because English hyphenation makes absolutely no sense. In fact, reading the list of examples, the mistakes listed makes more sense to me than the correct way of writing…

As a Swede I also do all of these things. And it doesn't feel like anything special, I imagine hundreds of thousands of people do the same.

Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

#496

Post by bilekas »

shevy-java wrote: post #488
nekitamo wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of their journalists also doxxed Naomi Wu, intruding on her personal life, making her lose her income, and possibly getting her in trouble with Chinese authorities: https://x.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/1209815150376574976 The journalist themselves is a real piece of work: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/463503-sarah-jeong-out-at... Kinda goes to show you the kind of people who write these stories. Ethics haven'…

> Kinda goes to show you the kind of people who write these stories. People can opt to not read and pay such people.

Funny enough in her own words, they don't much care..

> You’re wrong. NYT does pay attention to subscriber cancellations. It’s one of the metrics for “outrage” that they take to distinguish between “real” outrage and superficial outrage. What subscribers say can back up dissenting views inside the paper about what it should do and be.

Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

#497

Post by mptest »

nekitamo wrote: post #466
johnfn wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NYTimes infamously doxxed Slate Star Codex[1], despite him basically begging them not to because it would upend his psychiatry practice, back in 2020 for no reason other than because they could. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416

One of their journalists also doxxed Naomi Wu, intruding on her personal life, making her lose her income, and possibly getting her in trouble with Chinese authorities: https://x.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/1209815150376574976 The journalist themselves is a real piece of work: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/463503-sarah-jeong-out-at... Kinda goes to show you the kind of people who write these stories. Ethics haven'…

for a good counterbalance to those just finding out the nyt is a state dept mouthpiece at best, read about real journalists and why there seem to be so few of them, read Pegasus by laurent richard. Spoiler alert, real journalists who expose powerful peoples' wrongdoings simply get killed.

Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

#498

Post by bilekas »

nekitamo wrote: post #466
johnfn wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NYTimes infamously doxxed Slate Star Codex[1], despite him basically begging them not to because it would upend his psychiatry practice, back in 2020 for no reason other than because they could. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416

One of their journalists also doxxed Naomi Wu, intruding on her personal life, making her lose her income, and possibly getting her in trouble with Chinese authorities: https://x.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/1209815150376574976 The journalist themselves is a real piece of work: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/463503-sarah-jeong-out-at... Kinda goes to show you the kind of people who write these stories. Ethics haven'…

> “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men,” Jeong said in one tweet from 2014 that has since been deleted.

You weren't messing, she seems lovely.. /s

Re: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

#500

Post by teeray »

gyomu wrote: post #312

Simple question for anyone who’s familiar with this world of journalism: how does the author and the NYTimes cope with the fact that making such claims paint a huge target on the person they claim to have “unmasked”? Satoshi’s wallets are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and there have been kidnappings/torture/murders for much less than that. Do they just not care about the ethical implications? And really, for…

> What is gained by “unmasking” Satoshi other than satisfying one’s curiosity?

Those sweet, sweet clicks, and the eyeballs they bring along with them, of course

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