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Man Denies He's Bitcoin Founder

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Re: Man Denies He's Bitcoin Founder

#71

Post by gamblor956 »

Aqueous wrote: post #50

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…

Must also point out:

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.)

Re: Man Denies He's Bitcoin Founder

#72

Post by fchollet »

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.

Re: Man Denies He's Bitcoin Founder

#73

Post by danielweber »

fchollet wrote: post #72

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,…

The LA Times talked about how reporters were chasing Nakamoto, and had a link "follow the chase here."

Re: Man Denies He's Bitcoin Founder

#74

Post by declan »

fchollet wrote: post #72

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,…

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?

Re: Man Denies He's Bitcoin Founder

#76

Post by danielweber »

declan wrote: post #38
dmazin wrote: post #14

Wait, two hour exclusive for that? What else did they talk about? Off-record proof that he wasn't the man, I suppose?

AP is likely to do a writethru. That's their style. Patience.

For those of us that aren't journalists, what's a writethru?

Re: Man Denies He's Bitcoin Founder

#77

Post by fchollet »

fchollet wrote: post #72

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,…

Interestingly, it seems Satoshi just spoke out to state that he is not Dorian Nakamoto: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-sour...

Re: Man Denies He's Bitcoin Founder

#78

Post by declan »

danielweber wrote: post #76
declan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AP is likely to do a writethru. That's their style. Patience.

For those of us that aren't journalists, what's a writethru?

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.

Re: Man Denies He's Bitcoin Founder

#79

Post by bennyg »

declan wrote: post #74
fchollet wrote: post #72

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,…

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 Englis…

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.

Re: Man Denies He's Bitcoin Founder

#80

Post by selmnoo »

declan wrote: post #67
bhouston wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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