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Man Denies He's Bitcoin Founder

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Re: Man Denies He's Bitcoin Founder

#81

Post by declan »

bennyg wrote: post #79
declan wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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.

Re: Man Denies He's Bitcoin Founder

#83

Post by declan »

AP's writethru with more details is now up: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ap-exclusive-man-denies-hes-b...

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."

Re: Man Denies He's Bitcoin Founder

#84

Post by jballanc »

Hahaha...well played!

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.

Re: Man Denies He's Bitcoin Founder

#85

Post by sdrothrock »

fchollet wrote: post #77
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...

I don't think that means much, though.

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."

Re: Man Denies He's Bitcoin Founder

#86

Post by fchollet »

fchollet wrote: post #77
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...

It is remarkable that there was no such denial when Nick Szabo was widely outed as a likely Satoshi in tech blogs and the press a few months ago: http://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-nakamo...

Re: Man Denies He's Bitcoin Founder

#87

Post by declan »

selmnoo wrote: post #80
declan wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reas…

Take a look at the writethru. That's it.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ap-exclusive-man-denies-hes-b...

Re: Man Denies He's Bitcoin Founder

#88

Post by bennyg »

declan wrote: post #81
bennyg wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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 bu…

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.

Re: Man Denies He's Bitcoin Founder

#89

Post by skwirl »

gamblor956 wrote: post #57
devindotcom wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 journalis…

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.

Re: Man Denies He's Bitcoin Founder

#90

Post by nhaehnle »

DigitalSea wrote: post #54

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 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's not really evidence in any direction.

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