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The Face Behind Bitcoin?

mag.newsweek.com

211–220 of 703 posts

Re: The Face Behind Bitcoin?

#211
post #22

Being labeled Satoshi regardless of truth is pretty much going to get you robbed, kidnapped or killed. This dude lives in this town and has $400M of untraceable currency? The article gives his name, face, address and relatives. You can be sure as hell that somebody will do something stupid to try and get to it. I wouldn't wish this label upon anybody, it's exactly why the community tries to avoid speculating about it…

He's not the first person with 400 million or more. I guess he'll have to adjust to living like a millionaire/celebrity. The owner of the company I work for has thirty times the money Satoshi allegedly has, and yes, he has a bodyguard at most times. That said, I wish they'd protected his privacy more. It seems he didn't want to be outed.

OK but what if it's not him and some bad people think it's him? Then he has to adjust living like a millionaire but without the money to do so?

Re: The Face Behind Bitcoin?

#213
post #143
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're so comfortable with journalism, I'd like to interview you. But first please provide: • Full names and home towns of your children and your wife • Picture of your house – include a clear photo of your car's license plate • Your home town, so anyone can locate you on Google Maps • Your work history • Your net worth • Your health history • Any notable personality traits you have, so the whole world can comment…

Did I do anything of note that would make any of this information interesting to the public? I think I did not. If you want to put the work in and find all that out you are free to. I never once said that everyone should actually provide journalists with that information just like that. They still have to put the work in. Do that if you want to, but I don’t think you will find anything interesting.

Well let's hope that everyone else in the world becomes as uninteresting and uncontroversial as you, so they enjoy the comfort of de facto privacy. So what if all human progress grinds to a halt?

Re: The Face Behind Bitcoin?

#214
post #192
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine. Your skills give you the power, with a little effort, to invade someone's privacy. Because he's famous, you're more likely to pick on him. A journalist has the ability to take that to a whole new level by really shining a spotlight on it. Just because it's easy doesn't make it right.

I doubt that he's in much trouble with his 400m

The whole point is that it paints a huge target on his back. And he isn't even using that 400m to do anything deserving of vigilante/criminal attacks, and no one knows if he even really has it

Re: The Face Behind Bitcoin?

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding your point about paranoia: Here's an example of people in Ecuador executing a father and son for a mere $20,000: http://www.reddit.com/r/MorbidReality/comments/1zktth/quito_... This is what the Nakamoto family now has to worry about. It wasn't a random killing. There were at least 6 people arrested in connection with the murders. Apparently the robbers had people inside the bank who they were paying to aler…

Meanwhile Bill Gates, who is worth 200X more than SN, continues to waltz around in public.

Bill Gates spends millions of dollars per year on personal security.

Re: The Face Behind Bitcoin?

#216
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and people get robbed and killed for a few hundred dollar all the time. So what? That’s just a reality. I don’t really see the connection.

This wasn't a random robbery though. This was a systematic killing involving dirty banking employees who sent people to hunt them down. The connection is that $20,000 is a ton of money in Ecuador, and Nakamoto has a ton of money, so Nakamoto now has to worry about being hunted.

Except that Nakamoto lives in LA.

Re: The Face Behind Bitcoin?

#217
post #101

Topic other than discussing the irresponsibility of "outing" a guy using the clever tricks of using his name and public records look ups. > A libertarian, Nakamoto encouraged his daughter to be independent, start her own business and "not be under the government's thumb," she says. "He was very wary of the government, taxes and people in charge." > What you don't know about him is that he's worked on classified stuff…

If anti-government and inexperienced then: 'These libertarians are just backwards and don't understand government'

If anti-government and experienced then: 'Hypocrites!'

else: more government

It's a stronger position to oppose something you are experienced with and benefit from. Imagine a nuclear engineer who's advocating that the new plant she's working on is being built dangerously by the people in charge. Would you refuse to listen to her because she works there?

Re: The Face Behind Bitcoin?

#218
post #28

So Newsweek outed a guy who allegedly owns half a billion dollars in pseudo-untraceable, digital cash? I hope they're also going to chip in for a permanent security detail... More seriously, I think they could have done a better job reporting on the identity without giving so much away: * A picture of his house is posted, identical to the one in Google Street View * The license plate is relatively clear in the high-r…

You're right, they really did not think about the consequences did they...

I'm sure they thought about the consequences. They just got themselves a huge load of publicity...

Re: The Face Behind Bitcoin?

#219

worst reporting I've seen. it implies this person has admitted working on bitcoin. actually that's not even true, if you read the words. why on earth all this work, just to chose a real name? this does not make any sense. as if SN could not haven chosen a name to deflect his identity.

This quote tells you how sloppy the journalism is: "Even so, Bitcoin is vulnerable to massive theft, fraud and scandal, which has seen the price of Bitcoins whipsaw from more than $1,200 each last year to as little as $130 in late February." The MtGox price in February was meaningless, a more accurate representation would have been $1,200 to somewhere around $500 that reputable exchanges were selling for (I don't kno…

The ~$130 price was on BTC-e. It was very short-lived, and was caused by a very large dump of coins that were bought up by a bunch of bots, which met all the standing buy orders from ~$680 down to (if I remember right) $102.

The price immediately rebounded to the mid-$400's, once that order was consumed.

Re: The Face Behind Bitcoin?

#220
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, "deeply conservative" and "libertarian" aren't freely interchangeable. Second, it's a quite small branch of libertarianism that doesn't recognise any role for the state (and thus, taxation) at all - and the one they do recognise is mostly concerned with security.

Something I've learned over the years is that there are a tremendous number of highly different personal philosophies that call themselves "conservative" or "libertarian" that share only the loosest similarities, but the people who self-identify these ways also seem to comfortably self-group and display similar behavior and thought patterns. This is regardless of the textbook definitions of what these philosophies sh…

Not Objectivists. Others call us "libertarians," but we generally reject that. Because we don't agree with the people you're talking about on anything except politics, and where we agree, it's for different reasons.

tl;dr stupid arguments make good causes look stupid.

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