So Newsweek is back. Actual print, on actual newsstands, for the first time since they killed the paper edition at the end of 2012. And the cover story they picked to relaunch with is "The Face Behind Bitcoin" — a piece claiming to have tracked down the real Satoshi Nakamoto, and it's not some pseudonymous cypherpunk in Europe, it's a 64-year-old model train enthusiast named Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto who lives with his mother in Temple City, California.
I want to be clear about what actually happened today because by tomorrow this is going to be a mess of he-said-she-said. Reporter Leah McGrath Goodman spent months on this, apparently, tracking down family members, a sister who confirmed his full name includes "Satoshi," his physics and engineering background, his history doing classified defense work. She showed up at his house this morning. He came out, talked to police (who he'd called), and reporters say when asked about Bitcoin he said something like he's "no longer involved in that" and can't discuss it because of a nondisclosure agreement. Which, if true, is about as close to a confirmation as you're going to get out of a guy standing in his driveway with cops nearby.
Except a few hours later he was on the phone with the AP flatly denying all of it. Said he'd never heard of Bitcoin until his son mentioned it a few days ago when a reporter called. Said the "nondisclosure" comment was about a completely different defense contracting job, nothing to do with cryptocurrency, and that he misheard the question anyway because he's hard of hearing.
So which is it. Honestly I don't know, and I don't think anyone outside that family knows tonight either.
Here's the part that's bugging me more than the identity question itself, though. There was a car chase out of this. A literal car chase, reporters trailing his AP interview car through LA traffic because everyone wanted the first face-to-camera reaction. This is a guy who by every account just wants to build model trains and had nothing to do with any of this if his denial is true, and now his name, his mother's address, and photos of his house are everywhere. If Goodman's right, fine, he invented something that's currently worth billions of dollars in aggregate and dodging the press was never going to work forever. But if she's wrong, or even partly wrong, this is a genuinely bad way to treat a private citizen, and "well the Bitcoin community really wanted to know" isn't much of a defense.
And the Bitcoin community's reaction so far has mostly been anger, not celebration, which I think says something. A lot of people who've spent years insisting Satoshi's anonymity is sacred, part of the whole point, are pretty upset that a magazine just blew it open on a hunch and a driveway confrontation. There's already chatter that the actual Satoshi is going to have to say something publicly just to make this stop, which is a strange position to force someone into if you genuinely believe deanonymizing them is bad.
Worth saying too, this drops nine days after Mt. Gox went dark and filed for bankruptcy, so Bitcoin's had a rough couple weeks even before today. Half a billion dollars in bitcoins reportedly gone, exchange offline, and the community's default mood lately has been somewhere between shell-shocked and defensive. A story like this landing right in the middle of that isn't great timing for anybody trying to argue Bitcoin is a serious, stable thing and not just a mess of chaos and anonymous founders.
I kept my Newsweek subscription running out of stubbornness for about a decade after everyone told me print was dead, then let it lapse right before they announced they were going all-digital, which felt like exactly my luck. Funny to see them come back to print leading with a story this messy. Whatever the truth turns out to be here, I don't think "we doorstepped a retired train hobbyist" is the comeback cover story anyone at that magazine was hoping to be remembered for in five years.
Anyway. If you're the actual Dorian Nakamoto, or the actual Satoshi Nakamoto, or somehow both, I'd genuinely like to know how your Thursday went.