Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 905 posts

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

#511

Post by murderfs »

Barrin92 wrote: post #411
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

I always found that case a bit odd. For one he was blogging under his real name and had made his medical practice known, so you could just google him. It was upending his psychiatry practice because he blogged, albeit in anonymized fashion, about his patients without disclosing it to them which I'd say is unethical but at the very least in the interest of his patients to be made known to them. I would be pretty pisse…

> I always found that case a bit odd. For one he was blogging under his real name and had made his medical practice known, so you could just google him.

Cade Metz wrote the article under his real name, and his home address is public information, but presumably he wouldn't appreciate it being published on the internet. Why is that any different?

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

#512

Post by vidarh »

refulgentis wrote: post #212
vidarh wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At some point "Satoshi was a devoted reader of obscure 1997 Adam Back mailing list posts who shares his hyphenation errors, his Napster vs Gnutella analogy, his celebrity email filtering idea, his FDR gold ban interest, his 'burning the money' metaphor, his 'Achilles heel' description of DigiCash, his 'better with code than words' self-assessment, his energy-vs-banking defense, his British spellings mixed with Americ…

Your entire first paragraph boils down to me as someone who admired Adam Back and who may or may not have English as a second language, coupled with the one additional coincidence of when he was around.

In terms of language, I don't agree it's beyond a couple of tics everyone has at all. I also don't agree with the assumption that the starting set is ~500.

It's of course possible that it is Adam Back, but I don't find the purported evidence remotely compelling as a way of showing that it is.

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

#513

Post by omnimus »

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'…

I am not sure this is that clear cut. Naomi Wu agreed to interview then didn't want to answer some of the questions - instead of just saying no… she wrote social media threads and blogposts about how she can't talk about this because it's big bad china and all these western journalists are unprofessional not knowing her risk. For some reason then she tried to actually dox one of the journalists in her video.

Unfortunately looking back it seems pretty plausible that chinese gov censored her exactly because of her blogposts about how she is in danger in china.

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

#515

Post by omnimus »

mptest wrote: post #497
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'…

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.

One of the journalists was Jason Koebler who later cofounded 404media. That is imho pretty legit outlet which uncovered many pretty damning stories about tech.

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

#516

Post by indigo945 »

johnfn wrote: post #346
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…

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

Funnily enough, in the blog post you linked Scott Alexander also ruminates about how he never previously questioned journalistic attempts to dox Satoshi Nakamoto.

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

#517

Post by mike_hearn »

omnimus wrote: post #513
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'…

I am not sure this is that clear cut. Naomi Wu agreed to interview then didn't want to answer some of the questions - instead of just saying no… she wrote social media threads and blogposts about how she can't talk about this because it's big bad china and all these western journalists are unprofessional not knowing her risk. For some reason then she tried to actually dox one of the journalists in her video. Unfortun…

How do you "dox" a journalist? Are they writing under anonymous bylines now?

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

#518

Post by input_sh »

anshumankmr wrote: post #344
DeathArrow wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Satoshi’s wallets are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and there have been kidnappings/torture/murders for much less than that. So if Forbes publishes a list of the richest people in the world, it makes them targets?

do you need the forbes list of billionaires to know who is bezos, gates or musk?

There's 3428 on that list, I don't think it's feasible for any random person to know about more than 5% of them.

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

#519

Post by mike_hearn »

thehappypm wrote: post #318
idontwantthis wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just wondering the same thing.

Exposing the wealthy is pretty standard journalism

It's pretty standard left wing activism. Rags like the NYT pretending there's no difference, doesn't mean there is no difference.

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

#520

Post by Lio »

johnfn wrote: post #346
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…

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

It's the use of the word "quest" here that really bothers me. It seems ignoble.

Much like the "unmasking" of Banksy or Belle de Jour. Why do it other than nosiness?

Is the person committing a crime? No? Then leave them in peace.

This is just a journalist using the resources of NYTimes to show off that they can exert control over someone else.

Post reply on HN