Where the logic of him being "it" falls apart IMO is this:
His name is Satoshi Nakamoto, so he is vain enough to put his name on arguably one of the greatest technical papers of this century yet when directly confronted with being found out, completely and utterly denies being the guy who created it. Not even dropping any vagueries about whether or not he truly is the creator of bitcoin.
Again to iterate, the creator of bitcoin is vain enough to put his real name on the paper, but when all the cards are on the table he goes the path of vehemently denying it, refusing any recognition, and continuing to sit on his bajillions in bitcoin while he risks possible financial ruin and health problems.
There are people who create great things and just want to be left alone. But if their health was at risk, and they could anonymously ask for donations, why would they not do it? "He is too proud," Screw that you put your name on the technical paper.
But of course, this isn't the real Satoshi Nakamoto. Because that person truly wants to be left alone.
You want people to know some time in the future that it was you who created bitcoin? Leave a note in your will.
Someone correct me if I am wrong but I don't think Bitcoin took genius levels of C++ or cryptography knowledge. I am not saying Bitcoin isn't a genius invention (it is), I am saying that it wasn't necessarily hard to code up once the inventor conceived the idea. Also, it is not an advancement of cryptography, just an incredibly cool application of already existing cryptography.
Please don't take this as me saying it was easy to come up with Bitcoin, I am just saying the genius wasn't in Satoshi's coding skills, or advancements of cryptography, it was in his using of these tools to solve a problem many thought was impossible to solve (distributed consensus).
> Someone correct me if I am wrong but I don't think Bitcoin took genius levels of C++ or cryptography knowledge.
I think bitcoin is direct evidence of genius levels of C++, cryptography, and general software engineering knowledge. I'd place on par or better than git by Linus Torvalds (and as such I expect Mr Nakamoto to be someone much more like Linus than Dorian.)
The genius is in its relative simplicity, completeness, and effectiveness at both stating and solving the given problem. Upon seeing and understanding it (to the degree that I do), I'm curious at both who was able to invent it and what work it was that they built upon.
Based on the white paper Nakamoto released, "genius" levels of crypto were absolutely not required. An intelligent recent undergraduate or graduate who studied crypto could understand, suggest, and implement all of the crypto primitives and ideas discussed in the paper if they were given the scenario ("implement a distributed form of currency, with the ability to send payments and use computing power to mine transaction blocks"). No new cryptographic algorithms were invented by Nakamoto whatsoever, and his use of all the algorithms he chose have been in standard use for decades.
If you read the whole paper, you can see that any decently knowledgable CS student could grasp most, if not all of it, on the first read through. Hell, the most advanced math in the whole paper is just a handful of simple probability calculations.
Regarding C++: he's certainly a good C++ programmer, but if I recall many early contributors found his code to be messy and not that refined. It did the job and implemented the protocol, but I believe they ended up rewriting it almost from scratch later on.
The innovation in Bitcoin is the core idea and promoting the network; technically, it is not particularly innovative or unusual. Even the idea itself has been suggested by numerous cryptographers in the past decade, but only with toy implementations.
I personally posit that Nakamoto is not even a professional cryptographer, let alone a "world-class expert" or "genius". He probably has a bachelor's and possibly a master's in Computer Science. He probably worked as a C++ developer for many years and worked on some projects that involved crypto, and eventually came upon the idea of Bitcoin due to his libertarian ideals.
Going by his posting style and his actions in general, I think he was and likely still is a pretty ordinary, geeky programmer; not an academic. I think he's probably fairly young, too (under 40, maybe under 30). In fact, I think he falls right into HN's demographic.
> I personally posit that Nakamoto is not even a professional cryptographer, let alone a "world-class expert" or "genius". He probably has a bachelor's and possibly a master's in Computer Science.
Yeah, that's why I made the explicit comparison to Linus. I consider Linus's "inventions" of the linux kernel and git to qualify as genius achievements in software engineering and C programming. He didn't necessarily make ground-breaking discoveries; he didn't do the work in the context of higher academia (in fact he conflicted with academia), yet his innovations had enormous and profound impact. Same with bitcoin. I think these all merit a recalibration of what genius means.
This right here is the problem with HackerNews, everyone is making CRUD apps but then they want to comment on what is genius & what is not. What is even funnier is that most people here can't even complete their side projects or main projects/MVPs etc, but want to trivialize bitcoin.
I assume you are accusing me of trivializing Bitcoin? I expected that, which is why I went out of my way to point out that I was _not_ trivializing Bitcoin.
Please explain to me the reasons why you think I am wrong rather than condescending with no substance.
Ditto. I'm one of the plebes who can't finish the CRUD MVP but I consider myself at least a superior plebe because I'm smart enough to know that I'm dumb.
You know, when someone says "hey, I may be wrong, please correct me if so" and you respond by going triple-time on the snark and smug condescension, that's kind of a dick move even if he is wrong.
I find it kind of insane that so many people continue to expend any effort at all debunking Newsweek's claims. Unless they derive personal pleasure from it, just write the author off forever as a journalist, and Newsweek and its editors as a publication, and drive on.
Hi folks! I wrote the article (and woke up surprised to find it on HN).
I initially compiled this prior to Dorian's definitive written denial. Prior to that development, it genuinely seemed like the Newsweek article was going to (a) simply fade into obscurity and (b) never be retracted. The possibility of "b" was unacceptable, because without a final nail in the coffin, most news organizations would still treat it as though it were legitimate – e.g. referring to Dorian with phrases like "the alleged Bitcoin founder", and so on.
I think Dorian's written denial probably served as that final nail, but I still released this because despite the denials, I think Newsweek easily could have done the same research I did in compiling this, and come to this conclusion before they published the feature and damaged their rep.
I stopped in here to say, I really like the idea of listing points for and against a proposition being true, in ambiguous cases like this.
Often in relation to, say news stories or other controversial claims or ideas, the public have an interest in knowing which of conflicting versions is true, but lack access to primary sources of info. Then people who need to make a "best guess" are forced to rather subjectively estimate the plausibility of various statements, based on more subjective factors including estimates of general credibility of sources.
In such cases, it's probably best to make explicit the grounds for any conclusion - it clarifies for oneself, and may enable improvement by allowing others to review the estimates.
This was what I really liked about this article as well. I wish there was more news presented in this format, as it is making a point, but also presents counterarguments to its claims and the evidence for both sides.
The question the article is trying to answer is not whether Newsweek was wrong - everybody knows they are wrong, now.
The question the article is interested in, is whether they should have known that they were wrong, before publishing. I think that was already a pretty obvious YES before this matrix was compiled, but there's some value in systematizing it.
At the risk of voicing an unpopular opinion, I don't think everyone knows Newsweek is wrong. In fact, I think think there's some significant non-zero probability that Newsweek was right. The harder Satoshi's denials are, the more I think Newsweek was on to something here. I'm not saying Newsweek is right, but they are not provably wrong.
I (still) think Newsweek was probably right. I found his interview about "bitcoms" and "I've never communicated with bitcoin" to be at odds with who this guy is/was even if he wasn't the "bitcoin" Satoshi; just a bit over-the-top in selling an ignorance that I don't believe is likely in someone with his background.
Also to me the sending of a letter "via lawyer" seems fairly suspicious, adding some air of legal legitimacy to the claims without actually suing Newsweek or taking action that would open the issue up to real legal discovery.
>Also to me the sending of a letter "via lawyer" seems fairly suspicious, adding some air of legal legitimacy to the claims without actually suing Newsweek or taking action that would open the issue up to real legal discovery.
The standard for Newsweek shouldn't be that they publish something that might be true, and might be speculation, and maybe someone comes along to prove them false. If the publication wants to be credible, the standard is that the stories they publish should be provably true - especially if the accusation is going to inject chaos into somebody's life.
Why do the denials make you think Newsweek were right? If you were incorrectly named as something by a major publication and people refused to believe you, wouldn't you keep denying it?
If you were legitimately unfairly accused, your denials should at least be remotely credible and not make yourself out to be a hugely dishonest person. Dorian's denial fails quite badly on both counts.
As a general principle I will agree with probability statement, however I would like to note that given the evidence we have it might be smaller than one in eight billion. That is, provided satoshi is not dead, randomly chosen living human would have a higher chance of being satoshi.
So you don't think the circumstantial evidence presented (both by Newsweek and Dorian's interesting reaction to the article) make it's greater than 1 in 8B that Dorian is Satoshi? That's not a terribly tenable position.
This is more or less simple Bayesian logic. There is an explanation of every claim Newsweek made (explaining away). At the same time we have a lot more evidence of Dorian not being Satoshi. I just think that probability we would have observed all that evidence and Dorian being Satoshi is exceptionally small.
It's an excellent exercise in critical thinking skills where you're weighing the support for two mutually exclusive conclusions. On a more social level, we all benefit from this sort of push-and-pull with investigative journalism because ideally, it pressures journalists to ensure their work is well-supported before press. In all likelihood, Goodman and Newsweek will always have the scars from this debacle in the end. Even if Newsweek's story was proved accurate in the end, the fact that their return to print was shrouded in this sort of controversy is beyond embarrassing.
Not that simple. There's nothing about what Newsweek did that's in any way not standard operating procedure for just about every present-day journalist. Nobody checks facts any more, they've offloaded that responsibility onto us.
We put up with it because it's still easy enough for us to cognitively delude ourselves that there are still "good" outlets left, that conveniently line up with our personal partisan political views.
Journalism is no longer the art of being right, it's the art of being first.
"I find it kind of insane that so many people continue to expend any effort at all"
Oh come on now. Totally unfair.
"Unless they derive personal pleasure from it"
What's wrong if they do? What do people gain from watching
football or answering other peoples questions at no charge
on stack exchange?
"just write the author off forever as a journalist"
Are you saying the OP or the journalist at Newsweek?
Anyway I thought it was an excellent analysis (assuming of course the base facts are true...)
Your top comment is a put down in the vein of "anyone important wouldn't have time to do something like this". Like something a parent says to a child not recognizing that they might enjoy and gain benefit from something that the parent doesn't understand.
I was saying if they do derive personal pleasure, fine, but the horse is dead already.
(I meant the newsweek author should be written off as a journalist. And probably as a human being.)
He did an exceptionally good and thorough job in debunking it here, but he's also one of the ~10 most important people in Bitcoin, so I'm just kind of sad if he felt obligated to do this. If he did it because it was fun for him personally, then great.
I still think Dorian is very likely the Satoshi Nakamoto we're looking for. My basis for this is the fact that Dorian is very desperately trying to hide something, and it is evident in his denials, which contain claims that are very hard to believe. Three of the them stand out to me: His claim that he did not hear of bitcoin until February of this year, his claim that he thought the reporter was talking about "bitcom" and not bitcoin, and that the accusation of him being the creator of bitcoin has damaged his job seeking prospects. All three are nonsense claims and very hard to believe.
There's no way an out of work computer engineer could not have heard of bitcoin until so recently unless he was living in a cave. The hype of bitcoin was quite large and pretty much anyone computer literate would have heard of it, especially a guy who's name is Satoshi Nakamoto. As to his claim of thinking he was talking about "bitcom" not bitcoin, well according to the Newsweek article, Dorian was first informed of bitcoin through email, which means he likely could not have confused that word with anything else. Furthermore, he claimed he was told by his own son about it before he talked to the AP reporter where the confusion arose. Which means he has at least two clear-cut occasions where he would have been corrected beforehand. Finally, his claim of the "accusation" hurting his job prospects are quite silly, since he's been out of work for more than a decade. The argument makes very little sense, nor does it seem plausible being accused of creating bitcoin at all would hurt your job prospects. All in all, it's clear that Dorian is not being honest, and certainly you cannot trust his words at all.
Finally, if you believe he is the creator of bitcoin, then you must also realize he is a very intelligent man and should very easily write coherent English that could pass for a younger person, and then mask it in person when accused. On the other hand, he probably can't, no matter how smart he is, completely defeat logical analysis when is directly fingered. Plus, it's pretty rare to be this vehement in your denials unless there actually is some truth to the accusation (see Lance Armstrong, Roger Clemens, etc.). So I still see Dorian as being very likely being the guy, and this article doesn't do a particularly convincing job dissuade me otherwise.
As I pointed out elsewhere, claiming that he has no internet is rather inconsistent with the fact that he and apparently his brother Arthur clearly had access to the internet quite recently. This is another act of deception from him, and totally unnecessary if he merely wanted to clear up a misunderstanding.
What's the point in bringing that up if it does not at all impinge on one's ability to access the internet? Plus the whole financial distress argument doesn't at all sound plausible either, seeing he still has a house and apparently no major debts. No one in his family even brought it up in any previous incident.
Because presumably the mastermind behind bitcoin keeps an eye on it. Also, you don't know anything, at all about his personal finances. Maybe you're the real Satoshi. You only pop up to comment about how this guy must be the real one. That or you're a Newsweek shill.
I don't know, my dad is retired, used to work as an engineer and loves model trains. He doesn't know what bitcoin is. It really isn't that unusual for technical people to get out of touch with recent developments. A 64 year old Japanese immigrant with health problems almost certainly has very different sources of information to you and I.
Also, the vehement denials are extremely consistent with Dorian Nakamoto being a grumpy old man who doesn't understand what is going on but doesn't like it and wants to be left alone. It just seems like he just wanted to get rid of the reporter and she heard what she wanted to hear.
You'd expect there to be at least one Satoshi Nakamoto with an engineering background. Dorian Nakamoto's career doesn't seem remarkable or unusual (or closely related to bitcoin). I would expect every single person on Hacker News to fit the profile for the founder of bitcoin as well or better than Dorian Nakamoto. The fact that he has the same name as Satoshi Nakamoto doesn't indicate anything, because you would expect Satoshi Nakamoto to be a pseudonym.
Have you asked whether your father has even heard of bitcoin? I suspect a fair chance that he has. This is not adding the fact it would only take for someone in Dorian's family to merely google his name to learn of bitcoin.
The problem is Dorian is feigning total ignorance to the point of absurdity, followed by silly claims that somehow the accusation has damaged his family and his job prospects. He even went as far as claiming he has no internet service at all since last year, which is odd since clearly he must have emailed Leah Goodman only a month ago (another major plausibility problem in his denial).
It's one thing to be a grumpy old man, wanting nothing to do with the media, and quite another to blatantly lie and mislead people when trying to deny something. His behavior is closer to Lance Armstrong than just a grumpy old man. I think people need to weigh the credibility of both Dorian and the Newsweek article, and not merely dive head first into trying to disprove Newsweek at all cost.
You are grasping for the straws - leave it there. Many people when they get public attention especially unwanted attention react in abnormal ways which are compounded by cultural differences in case of immigrants. You are not on to something, Dorian is not Satoshi, case closed.
He has been living in US for more than 50 years; longer than I've been alive. He is also a Libertarian, a political position extremely rare in Japan. He appears to be totally Americanized with little trace of his former culture. His behavior is extremely similar to other people who turned out to have something to hide.
You have to admire the ingenuity and effort that went into not only blustering after the fact, but also creating the public portrait of "Dorian" the immigrant who'd never fully grasped the use of apostrophes, pluralization or indefinite articles whilst simultaneously privately corresponding in immaculate idiomatic English as "Satoshi". By the looks of those Amazon reviews and messages to editors there was some serious astroturfing going on!
Such a shame someone so keen on anonymity couldn't think of a pseudonym that wasn't composed entirely from part of his actual name.
You did read the official denial? The one we know is from Dorian. His English and punctuation is perfect. I fail to see how any argument that claims Dorian can't write English holds water. Maybe he wrote a terribly written comment somewhere but that doesn't mean he lacks fundamental English skills.
>There's no way an out of work computer engineer could not have heard of bitcoin until so recently unless he was living in a cave. The hype of bitcoin was quite large and pretty much anyone computer literate would have heard of it, especially a guy who's name is Satoshi Nakamoto.
Oh come on, that is just silly. I am positive there is computer literate people who haven't heard of bitcoin. Not everyone checks Hacker News, or news at all. I know I never watch/check the regular news, its extremely possible he never heard of it.
>Dorian was first informed of bitcoin through email, which means he likely could not have confused that word with anything else.
And not everyone has a good memory. The author could have asked him about bitcoin without explaining to him what it was which is why he didn't answer her questions, then he forgot what she was asking about, since it wasn't notable. Nobody is going to remember everything.
>Finally, his claim of the "accusation" hurting his job prospects are quite silly, since he's been out of work for more than a decade.
He has also had health problems in that decade which could have prevented him from seeking employment.
>Plus, it's pretty rare to be this vehement in your denials unless there actually is some truth to the accusation
Oh come on. He wants to be left alone! Of course he is going to be vehement in his denials so people will leave him the hell alone.
>Finally, his claim of the "accusation" hurting his job prospects are quite silly.
He is an immigrant. He might have a different cultural view than you over what hurts a job prospect. For example, I once visited a country where cheating in school was rampant. It was not only the norm, but completely socially acceptable, and it was though by the teachers that every student would cheat given the chance. Someone from that culture may not believe getting caught cheating would hurt their job prospects, for example. Stop looking at everything from your point of view. Furthermore, what's with the scare quotes in accusation? Even if the accusation is true, he was still publicly accused of being the bitcoin founder. It is irrelevant if the accusation is true or false, it is still an accusation.
Dorian Nakamoto is a retiree who used to work on secret projects for the government. Why is there some mystery why anybody wants to be left the fuck alone let alone someone like Dorian?
I agree that this is better than most of the post-Newsweek followups I've seen; but it still has things I take issue with like suggesting that the real Satoshi wouldn't have money problems because he's worth $500M-$1B in bitcoin.
I'd love for someone to explain to me how someone would go about converting the early Satoshi stash of bitcoins into even just millions of real dollars over a timespan of less than a decade or two, because as far as bitcoin has come on a number of acceptance fronts, it just doesn't have that sort of real-world liquidity or transferability to USD (or something else that does have that sort of liquidity).
I agree. Post the initial Newsweek article, it's the first balanced piece I've seen from the tech community. By comparison everyone else seems to be running around with their hair on fire.
Newsweek is a magazine that you find in the grocery checkout aisle, along with other notables such as Time, People, Cosmo, and National Enquirer. I don't think it has been considered a serious source of news since the 80s.
I looked at mage like that in the 80s and even then they were never reliable sources for anything. They were influential just because they reached mass audiences, and had a quality of "newsiness" or what's now called "info-tainment", but were always worthless for knowing what was going on.
In particular, the so called "news" magazines - and later the web and television media associated with the same big companies and others like them - had a remarkable talent for writing a whole article, sometimes a long one, with an authoritative tone in the prose, -and always with a "spin" that you might or might not notice - yet somehow never including any verifiable facts or figures, nor identifiable sources. The reader would get a vague impression of the topic and some claims about it, but never any glimmer of knowledge (edit:)(except maybe "big media companies want me to believe 'x', hmmm, why is that?").
I personally find Newsweek to be wrong in what they did, regardless of whether they are right or wrong in their conclusion. In the end, I think we should be respecting this person's desire for anonymity instead of trying to expose him.
The biggest thing that stood out to me here is not the difference in fluency in written English between examples from Dorian and the inventor of bitcoin, it's the obvious age cues in the use of language from Satoshi. Everything he writes reads as someone who is very much younger than a 60-something retiree. Little things like "Sweet, ...", "You know, ...", "You're right, sorry about that.", and so on are all clearly idiomatic of someone who developed their writing skills online. People in their 60s just do. not. talk. that way. To me this makes the idea of Dorian being Satoshi even more unbelievable.
Totally agree on the fluency, the real Satoshi's mother tongue is probably English.
Regarding age however, that's absolutely meaningless in this context, I know several people 50 or older that in text are indistinguishable from any younger generation. How you convey yourself in communication has more to do with your peer group and self image than your age. That sort of self-expression is particularly common in several generations techies, geeks, psychonauts, surfers, hippies and travellers.
Perhaps. Though clearly Dorian Nakomoto does not identify with a peer-group of young hackers. That's obvious from his lifestyle among other things. Whereas equally clearly the creator of bitcoin very much does.
Perhaps he's suffering from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder? History is full of brilliant geniuses with tough mental illnesses. With some speculation, you can most certainly create a scenario where it is at least possible the guy is the real Satoshi.
That sealed it for me, too. Satoshi and Dorian Nakamoto write like completely different people--so different that it's an unbelievably good false flag operation otherwise. Futhermore, Satoshi's style is appropriate to the demographic you expect of the creator of Bitcoin, and Dorian writes in a way consistent with what we know of him.
Wrong guy. If you want to find the real Satoshi, I'd start with the union of open source contributors, with an interest in early digital money, and a CS/math/ish grad student somewhere in the +1 to -10 years around 2007. Probably 30 to 40 years old now.
I think the academic angle (based on the use of a paper to announce the system) is pretty clear.
Someone signed into the actual Satoshi's account where the original Bitcoin announcement was made and left a comment on March 7 that Dorian is not Satoshi. Presumably this is actually Satoshi.
I've been surprised no one else has picked up on this.
Many people have picked up on it, which is why I've read it in multiple places. It's noteworthy, but less so than you seem to imply: a denial is exactly what we would expect if Dorian was Satoshi, and if Dorian was not Satoshi. So it's all the other evidence, in my opinion, that damns Newsweek, and not the post from Satoshi.
Everybody's spending lots of energy decrying Newsweek for being wrong. Why isn't anyone calling them out for, you know, being nasty muckraking paparazzi who'd try to drag a private individual (who's done nothing wrong and values his privacy) involuntarily into the limelight to make a quick buck?
Or do we all have so much outrage fatigue at this point that this shit doesn't even register?
His name is Satoshi Nakamoto, so he is vain enough to put his name on arguably one of the greatest technical papers of this century yet when directly confronted with being found out, completely and utterly denies being the guy who created it. Not even dropping any vagueries about whether or not he truly is the creator of bitcoin.
Again to iterate, the creator of bitcoin is vain enough to put his real name on the paper, but when all the cards are on the table he goes the path of vehemently denying it, refusing any recognition, and continuing to sit on his bajillions in bitcoin while he risks possible financial ruin and health problems.
There are people who create great things and just want to be left alone. But if their health was at risk, and they could anonymously ask for donations, why would they not do it? "He is too proud," Screw that you put your name on the technical paper.
But of course, this isn't the real Satoshi Nakamoto. Because that person truly wants to be left alone.
You want people to know some time in the future that it was you who created bitcoin? Leave a note in your will.