Reddit can be absurd, certainly, but on balance its contributors seemed to be on better terms with reality than some media professionals. Writing on Salon, Andrew Leonard mocked the “fury” of Reddit, saying, “To people who live in the real world, the sound and fury seems mostly absurd.” Some Reddit users may have been motivated by an intense devotion to Satoshi’s cryptocurrency, but, rather than taking their skepticism seriously, many media outlets pounced instead on the story of their “ rage,” scouring the site for examples of death threats, violence, or outright lunacy, which were then published with much fanfare. If so, Nakamoto was a master of disguise. But Bitcoin observers familiar with the writing of the real Nakamoto were flabbergasted by the suggestion that he (or she, or they) and Dorian Nakamoto might be one and the same. It’s fair to say that the anonymity of Bitcoin made the Newsweek reporter’s task unusually difficult. (It is worth noting here that Dorian Nakamoto told the Associated Press that one of the strongest pieces of evidence presented by Newsweek, his statement, “I am no longer involved in that,” was a reference not to Bitcoin but to his work as an engineer on classified government projects.) No one who’d been in on the alleged secret came forward to corroborate Newsweek’ s story, and no computer evidence of any kind-correspondence, keys, software-has been obtained, let alone vetted.įurthermore, it doesn’t take a cryptography expert to see the contrast between Dorian Nakamoto’s English writing and that of the Bitcoin inventor. This raises the question of why someone who’d been so obviously invested in maintaining his anonymity would choose to post under his own surname.Īt this point, we have still not seen conclusive proof that connects the identities of Dorian Nakamoto and Satoshi Nakamoto. In the early days of Bitcoin, it seemed possible that Satoshi Nakamoto was guarding his privacy because he was a professor or a Wall Street quant-someone whose employment might be unpleasantly compromised or complicated if he were discovered to be moonlighting. He was nonexistent outside Internet forums, where he discussed only technical matters. Though Satoshi Nakamoto wrote hundreds of online posts, as well as the original 2008 Bitcoin protocol, he included no details about where he’d lived, worked, or studied, and there was no trace of him on search engines. (Joshua Davis wrote about the search for Nakamoto in 2011.) Nobody in the worlds of cryptography and peer-to-peer (P2P) networking had ever been able to identify the Satoshi Nakamoto who invented Bitcoin, though he (or she, or they) had posted on a number of online forums well before Bitcoin was launched. The press took no heed of remarks like Pyalot’s before setting off on a wild-goose chase to Temple City, on Wednesday afternoon, which ultimately elicited a formal denial from Dorian Nakamoto, who told an Associated Press reporter that he had not heard of Bitcoin before Newsweek contacted his son, a few weeks earlier. Newsweek had staked a great deal on a story about which knowledgeable Bitcoin observers immediately found much to doubt. You know how you’ll get confirmation? Have him sign a message using a private key of coins known to be his, and have him post that message using his forum account.” don’t run to random people, and have them admit to being Satoshi Nakamoto, that’s just a wee bit crazy.
That doesn’t prove shit.” Confirming Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity, Pyalot continued, would require more than circumstantial evidence, or even a face-to-face interview: “Oh, and btw. “There’s countless people you could pin Satoshi Nakamoto on. “What’s that bullshit, some fan-fiction?” one Redditor, Pyalot, wrote shortly after the Newsweek article was posted. But on “r/Bitcoin,” the section of Reddit devoted to the digital currency, readers immediately began to express their doubts. In Newsweek, Leah McGrath Goodman cast Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto-a sixty-four-year-old engineer and model-train buff, living in a suburban house in Temple City, California-as the secret genius who set Bitcoin rolling.
0 kommentar(er)
