While I do feel bad for this guy's current situation (he clearly doesn't want any attention... sort of like the bitcoin Satoshi...hmm!), I really don't understand why so many people are jumping to the conclusion that this story is wrong/fake/some sort of conspiracy or whatever.
If there were a reasonable way to settle it for sure, I'd bet a substantial amount of money that this is the bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto. The pieces laid out fit pretty well. I think there's a lot of weird denial going on because people built up this crazy fantasy of an assumed identity, highly advanced mathematician guy and learning the dude's real name is actually Satoshi Nakamoto and he's a pretty regular joe (for a near recluse) is causing a cognitive dissonance.
Some of those links show him speaking in broken english with obvious misspellings, others are well structured and make him seem very obviously technically adept and attentive to at least hobbyist standards.
"Hi Nilayam,
1. Which wheels have spokes and how many spokes for each wheel? My UK built Pearse's 2-6-4 in 15mm/ft (1/20.3 scale) has all the wheels as solid disc (no spokes)
and I'm wondering if this is true on the real prototype's Kitson locomotives of the same class, such as the 4-8-4 shown in your photos.
2. What were the thickness of the tyres? I think the thickness should be 4.5" or 4.75" for a 2ft 6inch gauge track with 5" diam. axles?
If you can get close up photos of the wheels, that'll be great. The L&M's truck wheels were 1 ft 11 inches and the drivers were 2 ft 6 inches I believe.
Dorian Nakamoto
USA"
While these differences in writing style aren't conclusive in either direction; it does indicate that he is at least aware of how he conveys information online.
The idea that these reddit links are some kind of smoking gun is a bad case of rationalizing.
FWIW, my Father in law is a first generation Asian immigrant who is an engineer and for whom English is a second language.
His emails to my wife are like the one above - broken English, poor grammar.
But I've seen some documents that he's written for work - the early stages of patent applications, for instance - and they read like someone else wrote them, even though my FIL is the one who wrote them as they'd yet to have been submitted internally. Proper grammar, more formal prose. There is, every now and then, a phrase or word that seems out of place and not something a natural speaker would say, but the difference between in grammar between work and personal emails is night and day.
the burden of proof is on those who make the extremely unlikely claim that the person who painstakingly tried to hide his identity used his real name, communicates in native-level english on the Bitcoin forums and purposefully communicates in low-level English on all other internet forums.
From where I'm sitting the burden of proof is on those who claim he ever painstakingly tried to hide his identity. To me it looks like someone who doesn't like a lot of personal attention (something I can certainly relate to) creating something to scratch an intellectual itch and that thing grew far larger than he imagined, so he bowed out.
I see no proof that he is someone who was planning complete anonymity from the start, that seems to me like a bolted on rationalization from people confused by his partial disappearing act.
The newsweek article itself claims that Satoshi tried to hide his identity.
He never posted any personal information and used an anonymous japanese registration service for the bitcoin.org domain, payment in cash. An unlikely effort for somebody who doesn't care about anonymity.
The article quotes Gavin Andresen as saying "He went to great lengths to protect his anonymity.", but other than that doesn't offer anything to show that he actually was actively trying to hide his identity or was ever using a pseudonym.
If it helps a bit: Satoshi Nakamoto sent all emails over Tor, connected to Bitcointalk over Tor, and paid through the nose for bitcoin.org registrar & hosting services on Anonymousspeech.
Somehow you've mistaken life for a courtroom where we all need to meet the same standard of proof. I don't care what your burden of proof is, the preponderance of the evidence to me says that this is the guy. Now if Newsweek comes out and retracts the fairly unambiguous quotes we saw earlier I'm more than happy to change my views.
There is substantial variation in those samples themselves let alone between those samples and the bitcoin whitepaper. Some of them are written like bad text messages and some are perfect but awkwardly formal, and some are perfectly conversational. If those posts were consistent and at odds with his bitcoin writing (on the forums -- including the whitepaper is silly, virtually everyone writes differently for 'formal' papers) maybe they'd be decent proof, but they are all over the map.
Well, yes, of course it causes cognitive dissonance. It is 2014 year now and buzz around his personality is going for a pretty long time already. Both virtual and that one Satoshi-s are said to be worried about anonimity, using VPN to send emails, etc. And yet it is said he used his real name all this time. And being discovered only now by some journalist. Seriously, it is weird just by itself, not mentioning all these little discrepancies in their appearing personalities.
And both "Satoshi" and "Nakamoto" are fairly common japanese name and surname by the way, so I doubt if this one is really the only programmer Satoshi Nakamoto.
I think it is only being discovered now because nobody really looked before, at least not in the sense of actual research and journalism as opposed to googling some shit and doing a blog post.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are other programmers named Satoshi Nakamoto. McBay is a fairly uncommon name and I'm not even the only programmer named George McBay and the other one (who as far as I know isn't directly related in any way) is from Japan! Small world!
But that aside it isn't just the tech/math background, it is the total picture as laid out in the article. Unless the article is totally fabricated, which I have no reason to believe it is, the case it makes is pretty compelling.
Nobody looked before, really? Speculation about "who is Satoshi Nakamoto" has been around for years now, except previous Satoshi-s weren't called that and were suspected based on their deeds in field of cryptography. Wikipedia [1] mentions 6 of them and I've heard of more.
And "journalism" (professional one) usually makes me suspect making up random stuff much more than anything else. They are paid to make scandalous articles, you know.
To be fair, I don't personally claim it is fake. I say it is weird and makes me easily accept someone claiming it is fake.
I don't really have an opinion on Satoshi, but I don't think it's all that hard to cherrypick details from someone's life to give whatever overall impression you want.
That said, I don't think the cognitive dissonance is because of some crazy fantasy however. The creator of bitcoin clearly went to some great lengths to avoid people knowing his actual identity. Given this, it seems very odd for them to have used their real name in all communication.
What pieces? That he's kind of odd, according to his family? (if you were to take my family, which is fairly normal, 1/2 of us think the other 1/2 are odd). Who doesn't have an odd, reclusive uncle or two?
That he made a vague, difficult to interpret statement (and proceeded afterwards to completely deny any connection between himself and bitcoin)?
That he's "libertarian" according to his estranged daughter (though the following quote doesn't sound libertarian at all to me):
> Then Dorian also wrote about “being tired” about another issue: “I’m really tired of having the JACL, et al. requesting or getting $100K to millions in government funds for Japanese American monuments, about the camps or any other issue. Those money should be send on the JA’s practical needs and growth for the new generations. More dollars should be funded for startup businesses, business education, nursing services (yes, forget Keiro with high self salaries) and all they talk about is executive orders, camps, never about the betterment of JAs on their current living conditions or betterment of young ones going out to the world of business, competitions, financial education, etc.
That it was written in Newsweek? Here is an actual quote from the article:
> Of course, there is also the chance "Satoshi Nakamoto" is a pseudonym, but that raises the question why someone who wishes to remain anonymous would choose such a distinctive name.
What a shoddy piece of journalism. The authors of the Federalist Papers (Madison, Hamilton and Jay) used the pseudonym Publius. At least that name is really distinctive, in that no one was actually named that, unlike "Satoshi Nakamoto" seems like a common enough name for (also according to the article) there to be "several" living "Satoshi Nakamotos".
EDIT: I expect to get a lot of up votes now thanks to this :) :
In an exclusive two-hour interview with The Associated Press Dorian S. Nakamoto, 64, said he had never heard of Bitcoin until his son told him he had been contacted by a reporter three weeks ago.
Reached at his home in Temple City, Calif., Nakamoto acknowledged that many of the details in Newsweek's report are correct, including that he once worked for a defense contractor. But he strongly disputes the magazine's assertion that he is "the face behind Bitcoin." http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_BITCOIN_FOUNDER_DE...
counterpartyd broadcast --help
counterpartyd broadcast --source='SOURCE_ADDRESS' \
--text='[BINARY] Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, by his own admission or indisputable evidence on or before June 21, 2014' \
--value='1' \
--fee-fraction='0.1'
Unfortunately it may be very hard, or take a very long time, to either confirm or deny this claim. What is the standard of evidence for the bet to be won or lost?
For the record I strongly believe Newsweek got it wrong, and that he's the wrong guy.
You base this conclusion on one line of speculation in the article? Did you miss the part where the journalist flew out, went to the person's house and spoke to them to confirm it was really him before running the story? Sounds like excellent journalism to me.
Yeah I did miss that part. From what I read, the journalist spoke to him for about 15 seconds, within which he didn't really say anything at all, and was then shown the metaphorical door.
I guess we've reached the point in the argument where you've decided to go Flat Earth Society on us. For the record:
"I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it," he says, dismissing all further queries with a swat of his left hand. "It's been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection."
In an exclusive two-hour interview with The Associated Press Dorian S. Nakamoto, 64, said he had never heard of Bitcoin until his son told him he had been contacted by a reporter three weeks ago.
I don't deny he's now saying this. That's the substantial difference: argumentum is saying he earlier "didn't really say anything at all" which is frankly baloney.
Funny you read "Dorian S."'s earlier quote and see something, I read it and see nothing. Or actually, not nothing, just not something that means anything.
That part about "distinctive name" actually sound like shoddy piece of journalism. It's like calling "John Smith" distinctive. But while "John Smith" means nothing for native speaker, Satoshi (if written like 聡) can be interesting pen-name, meaning "wise" (google translate won't help you this time, so check http://jisho.org/kanji/details/%E8%81%A1 ).
That doesn't mean much though. Every Japanese kanji used in a name means something on its own. Since they're used in names, they all are technicially "interesting". When people tell other people their names in Japan, they will often say how it's written in Kanji specifically to point out those distinctive meanings.
I know every kanji means something ("meaning something" is something kanji are made for, you know) and Satoshi (the Satoshi, I mean) never wrote his name in kanji by the way. But 中本聡 is something more "bitcoin-ish" than some 山本ヒロト, don't you think? So that name isn't really something unlikely to make up. I'd say randomly making it up is really really more likely than being the Satoshi's real name.
The linguistic analysis actually holds up pretty well (both his writing style and his coding style), and the totality of the circumstances wherein Satoshi matches Bitcoin Satoshi makes it very unlikely that this is a "shoddy piece of journalism."
Also, you must not have read the part of the article where the journalist runs through and describes why the other Satoshis are not the Bitcoin Satoshi.
What "linguistic analysis"? What "coding style"? Was any actual code written by "Dorian S. Nakamoto" presented?
Where is some evidence he even knows how to program?
From the links on Reddit, which are the only pieces of writing that can be confirmed for "Dorian", I see absolutely no similarity with the style of the bitcoin paper. None, at all.
> describes why the other Satoshis are not the Bitcoin Satoshi
Where is this? She says "Dorian" was the only plausible Satoshi, and proceeds to use interviews and the absence of any hard evidence as evidence. It's like a creationist saying "how come there are no fossils of the missing link"?
Here's why it's shoddy journalism:
The process also requires a good amount of math, something at which Nakamoto - and his entire family - excels. The eldest of three brothers who all work in engineering and technical fields,
The only "evidence" that the family "excels" in math is that they work in engineering or technical fields. No papers published, nothing except that a couple of them worked at Hughes aircraft (including Dorian S.).
My mom is actually an engineer at Raytheon and before that Hughes. She had to get national security clearance and her work there can be described similarly. I'm sure many HN users have had to get security clearance. It's not that big a deal. Though my whole family consists of engineers, and even some professors, I would not particularly describe us as "excelling" in math. That is probably true for a lot of HN users as well.
And even if you were to make such a claim, it is in and of itself no evidence that this Satoshi is the Satoshi. On the other hand, if he had been publishing cryptography papers or game theory papers or even CS papers for a while, or even demonstrated any interest at all in cryptography similar to his interest in model trains ..
If this person is the Real Satoshi, why are all forum posts except the ones bitcointalk.org about model trains and Royal Danish Cookies?
Not a single post in any programming forum, not a single stackoverflow question, zero online participation in anything related to cryptography or programming.
If we are to believe that the developer of Bitcoin didn't mind using his real name online, what's the explanation for this?
> If this person is the Real Satoshi, why are all forum posts except the ones bitcointalk.org about model trains and Royal Danish Cookies?
Dorian seems to have fragmented his online activity under a variety of nicknames: so far people've found "ShtenDoji", "schten", "Schten Dohkji", "WagumaBher", and "ssshupring" (and I'm not sure if that's a complete collation of Redditor findings). Most of them have been linked either by him forthrightly mentioning Satoshi, or are variants of others. We could easily have missed years of programming activity. So it's not yet a strong argument from silence.
Might I suggest http://longbets.org/ for this? To make it legal in the US, the money ends up going to a charity of your choice, but it's a great way to put something on the record.
Note: Shameless promotion for something I wrote code for.
The worst thing is that this could be a ploy to force the real bitcoin founder to show himself/herself - implicitly their threatening to keep screwing-up random people's lives.
You are betting against something like the chance of there being a Satoshi Nakamoto who is not involved in writing bitcoin, but may have done something else using bitcoin that makes him not want to talk to the press enough to spook a newsweek reporter.
I don't think I know enough either way to make a good bet and I'm not sure that reporter does either.
The denial going on is because there is no proof (thus your invitation to a bet). I find it hard to believe (read impossible) that Newsweek was the first person to have thought of looking through public records to find him.
This right here is like a case study in why a "Computer Science" education doesn't make one a "scientist".
The only thing here is coincidence, allegation, and innuendo: There's not the slightest hint of proof. This is shitty journalism and shitty investigative rigor. What it comes down to is a name and being smart.
Maybe he is the actual bitcoin Satoshi. But there is not one piece of positive evidence that is the case. Everything is circumstancial to the highest degree. Personally I think the standard of evidence for something this important should be higher.
In the video he says "I'm not involved in Bitcoin" (present tense) which is not inconsistent with what was reported in the Newsweek article:
>"I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it," he says, dismissing all further queries with a swat of his left hand. "It's been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection."
I say this because the headline is trying to imply that Newsweek identified the wrong man, and as a result people are on twitter gloating about Newsweek being "wrong." Even if they do end up being wrong, this article and the corresponding video aren't evidence one way or the other.
Well the newsweek article also included a back and forth with a police officer that likely never happened, and they also just published an article that "proves" heaven exists because a former scientist went into a coma and saw some pretty things while dreaming. I'm not sure there's a high barrier to meet here, or that we can't assume he was misquoted in the original article.
a back and forth with a police officer that likely never happened
I find this complaint ridiculous, like there's no possible way a police officer could know such things because otherwise they'd been a l33t h4x0r. Police officers read newspapers in about the same proportion as everyone else.
It's the nature of the quote that makes it seem like it comes out of a movie or something. It is still plausible he said that verbatim, but unlikely in my opinion.
Uh huh. Sure. An officer isn't aware of a digital currency that has been the topic of dozens of mainstream news reports over the past few months, and which had a strong relationship to drug and property crimes.
The name Satoshi Nakamoto has appeared in The Good Wife, CSI, CSI NY, NCIS, NCIS LA, Big Bang Theory, Blue Bloods, Almost Human, and Scandal at some point in the last year.
So I'm pretty sure the name is no longer a tech community secret.
She is referring exactly the very exchange that took place in video linked in this submission I just described above. Where do you see anything denying past involvement in what you linked?
edit: I saw this (separate) tweet almost immediately after submitting, but HN went down when I tried to edit - https://twitter.com/byandreachang/status/441696297964158976. So she is claiming he said "No no no I was never involved." Which would imply that he wasn't telling the truth to either Newsweek or to this reporter, unless you believe Newsweek makes things up.
I think it's just because he is a Japanese. To most East Asian people, we often use wrong tenses because there's no tenses in our native language. This happens to people even if they were in the U.S. for decades. It's actually not about how long you've been in the U.S., it's about when did you start using English as your primary language. If they started using English (as their major language) when they were 20s, it is likely they would make mistakes about using tenses.
Forgot about that. The staff of the "new new Newsweek" did an AMA a month ago [0].
Interesting discussion under a reply [1] to this question:
> Do you feel like you are able to avoid the reliance on fear-mongering tabloid journalism and human interest that seems to be the focus of cable news sometimes?
This is obviously not the Satoshi they were looking for. The Newsweek article reads like a ridiculous pageviews grab, sloppy with facts and extremely disrespectful for Dorian Nakamoto.
The foundation of why the journo thought he was Satoshi was... his birth name (which he actually changed years ago, and that is not a particular rare name). Yeah, no contradictions whatsoever here:
>> "He went to great lengths to protect his anonymity"
This mentions 'anger' as in "After a full day of wild speculation and anger, the LA press have finally tracked down Nakamoto and he’s receiving a grilling."
I don't get it, who is angry? This guy could be angry about having his life invaded but where is the emotion coming from here?
The anger is coming from the bitcoin community, mostly because they're afraid for Satoshi's life. Someone could kidnap/torture him to try to get his bitcoins.
Well, there isn’t openly violence from the hackers, but three exchange has been hacked recently (that we know of), leading to at least one suicide… More importantly, such public heist seem to have been able to merge in the mass too fast for anyone to track them: that comes off as a step above a suitcase of unmarked bills. And, yes, it does happen: South Americans, in general, but the order of magnitude of the amont, and the lack of security makes it possible.
It’s hard to assess the actual risk: cartels haven’t necessarily been associated with cryptographers, but Silk Road made a connexion, and home-made submarines have proven a track record of adopting innovation fast and efficiently.
The sliver of risk, no mater how thin, seems not worthy of openly naming the person, as opposed to offering close-up photo and a third party confirmation that the details appear consistent.
I suppose the difference is that most people with a reported $400 million don't keep it in cash at home. As I understand it, Bitcoin is more like cash in that possession is ownership.
One doesn't even have to be in the bitcoin community (or a redditor) to feel sympathy for an obviously private guy who has had a reporter stalking him and his family and publishing photos of him, his house, etc., in a major news publication. Whether he's the creator of bitcoin or not, he and his family are now the focal point of an intense amount of attention and as you highlight, possibly danger.
You think that it would be the polite thing to do for reporters not to pursue him. I agree with you. I think where we differ is with the respect to the obligation of journalists.
Journalists are in the business of finding out information that's useful for an open democratic society in making decisions. If this person might be the genuine Satoshi, then it stands to reason he might offer useful information or a new perspective on Bitcoin or money in general.
Thus I think to not pursue this story as a journalist would be a violation of j-ethics.
You are attacking a retired engineer who lives a zen-like life in a suburban McMansion, after a brain accident because he can get “whatever [he] want?” Really?
I dislike people who conflate the median with the average ("It’s just not possible for 60 percent of the men in a room to be above-average drivers, unless you’re at a Nascar convention." -- it is certainly possible, its not possible for 60% to be better than the median driver, even if you are at a NASCAR convention.)
Depending on the number of people in the room, it might not be that unlikely for 60% to be above the global median, either. If there are three people, 100% are going to be above the median, 66% are going to be above the median, 66% are going to be below the median, or 100% are going to be below the median... All of those is more "dramatic" an outcome than 60%.
I'd think Bitcoins would be a whole lot easier to trace than dollar bills.
The real reason behind this fear is that some consider Satoshi their hero and icon. Anything, therefore, that he doesn't or wouldn't (if you maintain this isn't the real Satoshi) approve of especially as it relates to himself inspires strong feelings and irrational justifications like "he could be kidnapped and tortured."
Or at least that's the only reason I can imagine this argument keeps coming up. Any other wealthy person could also be kidnapped and tortured. Heck, most wealthy (100m+) people probably have pretty valuable things just laying around their house that are far less traceable than Bitcoins.
Bitcoin is certainly easier to trace than dollar bills - I'm not confident about "a whole lot easier". But few people have the kinds of sums Satoshi purportedly has in BTC sitting around in any liquid asset in their home. I certainly hope Satoshi doesn't, either, but it's significantly more likely that he can move tremendous amounts of value without involving intermediaries (and thus more risk) than it would be for really any other individual.
Of course, in this case, I hope the bitcoin network would resign itself to coloring those coins, if Satoshi was extorted out of his coins.
Sure, but his bitcoins probably aren't just sitting around either. The fear was that he'd be kidnapped/tortured in order to acquire them. If we're allowing for that, it seems like anyone with sufficient wealth would be a target.
It's still easier to un-reversibly steal large $X in BTC than in USD, in most of the ways people store large amounts of the respective currencies. Stealing from your bank acount involves more people and more moving parts and thus more risk (and large transfers are watched).
I agree there's (hopefully) a good chance his BTC are in cold storage in a safety deposit box, or something. People fail to do that with BTC more often than people fail to put millions of USD in the bank, though.
Actually, I've been wondering if he didn't withdraw from BTC because he was embarrassed about having lost the private keys to his early accounts... :-P Not that I really think that likely, either.
Their money might be in various physical assets or a bank. This guy could have keys on seizable hardware and could be coerced into giving up passwords that might quickly lead to tens of millions.
I am, for the poor guy that may or may not be the author of Bitcoin but who, and whose family, is now being watched and constantly approached with questions.
IT's not trespassing to go up to someone's front door, otherwise the mail wouldn't get delivered. You can step on to the curtilage of someone's property, but you must leave if you are asked to do so - although nothing prevents you hanging around on the street in front of the property in hopes of getting an interview. If this becomes onerous, one can get a restraining order, but courts are cautious about handing them out to journalists engage din legitimate news gathering.
In short, they feel like they can get away with it because they can legally get away with it.
What if you purposely did not have a mailbox on your home but at the edge of your property (like much of rural America vs suburban) and you had no obvious front-door.
Would a person then be entitled to wander around your property looking for you? I would hope not.
So by having a front-door you are suggesting people are allowed to just walk onto your property, up to the door, anytime they feel like it and harass you?
If no door or you do not answer, how about your back window? Bathroom window?
You're conflating two different things - walking onto your property, and harassment. In general trespass to land - meaning to enter onto someone's property without a valid excuse, although the range of acceptable excuses can be very broad - is a tort, although it can also be a criminal offense in most US states. If someone refuses to leave or keeps coming back, then are of course within your rights to eject them,sue them, get a restraining order against them and so on.
But in general, if you don't want people to knock on your front door then put up a sign, or a fence, or some other indication that you want to be left alone. you'd better, because if you allow people to trespass on your land without doing anything about it - say they cross your land to go fish in a river that lies just beyond it - then they may develop a right from your failure to challenge them, sometimes known as adverse possession or an easement by prescription. And no matter how vigorously you defend your borders, you can't stop planes flying over unless they're going so low as to be hazardous to you.
So, next time I want to walk across town, I am just going to put a reporter's notebook in my pocket and just skip walking on the roads.
Instead I will walk across everyone's property and if the police eventually stop me, I will say I intended to interview the homeowners but changed my mind.
I will occasionally walk up to people's doors and knock on them just to be plausible but since the law cannot read my mind or intent, they have to accept I am a journalist and have free speech rights to walk across anyone's property.
Obviously this is an absurd extreme example but it follows your basic rules. And shows why they fail. You cannot just walk across town, across everyone's property. Yet do it on a small scale to harass a single person and it is okay?
The law can't read your mind or intent, but the court can and will draw inferences from your observed behavior and in this case will almost certainly conclude that you are trolling. Why don't you try learning something about the how the law operates in practice instead of projecting your mechanistic conception onto it? I suggest How Judges Think by Richard Posner, who's quite readable and probably the most widely-cited living legal scholar in the US.
Instead I will walk across everyone's property and if the police eventually stop me, I will say I intended to interview the homeowners but changed my mind.
For example, this might come off as a plausible argument if you walked up a few houses and then turned away, but the plausibility of your argument diminishes in inverse proportion to the number of property lines you cross without acting upon your stated purpose. You seem to think that judges live in some sort of vacuum which renders them incapable of applying common-sense standards or their own experience to the facts of a case. Now, this is arguably the case in some civil law systems - Posner offers an amusing example of a French law which made it illegal to disembark from a stationary train carriage due to a drafting error - but it's a far cry from how our common law system works or has ever worked.
Yet do it on a small scale to harass a single person and it is okay?
Here you're doing something called begging the question - you're assuming your conclusion as a fact. You consider unwanted journalistic attention to an individual to be harassment, and so you ascribe that as a purpose to the journalist. Think about it; the journalist isn't going to someone's house to make their life miserable, but in pursuit of information, which information may (or may not) be an object of legitimate interest. Finding out whether someone is the architect of a multi-billion dollar digital economy seems like an entirely legitimate subject of journalistic inquiry to me.
The law is not executed on some sort of Turing engine. It is guidelines for humans to interpret real-world situations.
I encourage you to post what happens when you do this and explain your theory here to a judge. Having seen what happens when somebody tries to outsmart a judge in his own courtroom, I promise it will be memorable.
Would a person then be entitled to wander around your property looking for you?
In the UK, they sort of would. You can wander onto most private property until asked to leave, as long as you do not break anything. Only if you then refuse to leave is there any issue for a court or the police. Of course, if you just wander into someone's house and they attack you as an intruder, then you are not going to get much sympathy, however just the act of trespass is not inherently illegal. Other than in Scotland, where it gets a little more complex, on open ground I think trespass is criminal but defined as breaking camp, so walking around is still fine.
> courts are cautious about handing them out to journalists engage din legitimate news gathering.
I doubt that it it News Worthy to be the 150th person with a TV camera standing at a recently declared news-worthy spot, or that most of those are gathering something that isn’t being recorded.
You are confusing their entitlement, a psychologically concerning lack of proper upbringing, respect and human decency, with rights. I could fill your inbox with abuse, threats and sickening images arguing it’s my god-given privilege — you’d still wonder why on Earth I would feel like ruining your life like that.
And as pointed out, you are wrong about to whom the First Amendment applies to.
Is "in mass" completely incorrect? I know "en masse" is the French version and what is usually said (and what I typically say/write, too), but "in mass" sounds syntactically and semantically correct to me.
Unfortunately, this doesn't really tell us much. Of course with the initial info, the rest of the media would track this poor guy down eventually and hassle him until he gave them something. All that's really clear is that he's a bit of a shut-in with no interest in media attention. The only thing he could do that would really be conclusive is to somehow produce enough evidence that he really is the Bitcoin creator Satoshi.
He can deny all he wants, but it'll be impossible to prove that he isn't that guy unless a "real Satoshi" pops up somewhere. Conspiracy theorists on all sides will continue to spin plenty of plausible scenarios both ways. And of course, if he did confirm it, people would still doubt it until there was really solid proof.
But seriously, if this really is the Satoshi Nakamoto and he has been seriously ill with two seperate life threatening illnesses in the recent past, how come none of those bitcoin he supposedly owns have shifted on medical bills?
The claim that he'd have to publicly go onto MtGox to get funds out of his Bitcoin supply is absurd as well. If you're going to move a few million dollars, you can afford to do it right as a private sale using agents who won't blab to the press or anyone else (as long as you pay your taxes)
Everyone would know that an early adopter moved some coins, but the IP address of the Starbucks that his lawyer's tech guy makes the transaction from isn't going to leak much.
It's been suggested that Satoshi lost or deleted his keys when he left Bitcoin around 2009. It's entirely possible he no longer has (access to) these Bitcoins.
I would like to argue on the possibilities of him not being Satoshi Nakamoto. Other than having the career, which could profile him as the likely Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin inventor, the article build up him to be one.
I am going to argue against the most convincing statement:
"It's been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection."
As someone who has engineering background in CS field, he will be aware of the Bitcoin and a peculiar case of having similar name (He is Dorian S Nakamoto). Thus, he will be a bit more interested in it(People with unique name can share that sentiment) and know enough about the Myth of the disappearance of the Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin inventor. We(including him) all know the kind of disturbance we will face if we were identified as mysterious Bitcoin Inventor. There is also a cloud of uncertainty over legality of Bitcoin. I don't think the news about Silk Road with Bitcoin and the FBI issue will help either. For him, he has to be more weary since he shares part of the name. So when this privacy invading journalist come knocking on his door, he pull the Bitcoin inventor act saying that he relegate the task to other to shoo her away thinking it will be over. An easy way out, he might have thought. The fact that he cannot disappear like the Bitcoin inventor did not register in his mind at that time. He could have been pestered by people about Bitcoin before, just like the journalist started asking him about Bitcoin in the middle of model train email exchanges. He is the real Dorian S Nakamoto. He cannot deny his name but he is not a mythical Satoshi Nakamoto. If you were an introvert, how would you react in that situation? You most likely shut up just like he did. Around these assumption the journalist build up the theory that Dorian is the Bitcoin Inventor.
Anyway, I am pissed at the NewsWeek on violating the privacy of individuals(Dorian S Nakamoto and Satoshi Nakamoto) who wants to be left alone.
I wonder why he doesn't outright deny it all, current and past involvement. He doesn't want to be involved, as far as we know, so why would he care if it's a lie that he has never been involved? Would he not lie out of integrity (assuming it is him)?
Or does he have some plan to out himself at some point, and is it just that he hadn't wanted it to happen like this? Hmm. Well this last part is only wild speculation, in my opinion this hunt and questioning of him and his family should stop right now, but I still wonder.
> I wonder why he doesn't outright deny it all, current and past involvement.
This may well be what he's done in his 2-hour long interview with the AP reporter, an article on which should come out very soon, according to https://twitter.com/JoeBelBruno
I didn't know that the origin of the bitcoin was in so
much doubt.
But after seeing this story, the reddit stuff, and other comments around the web, this just seems like a lot of complicated drama. I don't see how serious people will take Bitcoin seriously let alone have it bring about a libertarian revolution.
Well it's not the origin of Bitcoin itself, it's about which human individual or group wrote the initial paper and the initial version of the software. It's a side-issue that is mostly pursued out of curiosity.
Note that this doesn't mean that I agree that curiosity justifies the current witch hunt, but that's another matter.
"Not involved with Bitcoin" leaves the door open to having been involved with Bitcoin in the past. I wonder if he was trying to deny past involvement with Bitcoin but worded it poorly, or if he was merely being clever in his wording, like a politician. Perhaps we'll find out.
this thing's a mess and full of he said she said they said. Honestly I expected better of Newsweek, running an unverified story.
Even if he <i>is</i> the bitcoin creator, it's now forever going to be tainted with uncertainty since there's absolutely no verifiable proof that he is, only a lot of speculation.
Regardless of what you think of Newsweek, they are savvy enough to know that a story like this would kick up a lot of secondary reporting and staging this and using an actor would essentially equate to suicide of their news organization.
If there were a reasonable way to settle it for sure, I'd bet a substantial amount of money that this is the bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto. The pieces laid out fit pretty well. I think there's a lot of weird denial going on because people built up this crazy fantasy of an assumed identity, highly advanced mathematician guy and learning the dude's real name is actually Satoshi Nakamoto and he's a pretty regular joe (for a near recluse) is causing a cognitive dissonance.