So Newsweek came back from the dead this week (literally, this is their first print issue since they killed the paper edition back in 2012) and the comeback cover story is "we found the guy who invented Bitcoin, and he lives in Temple City, California, and drives a Corolla." I have opinions about this and none of them are nice.
The short version, if you missed it: a reporter named Leah McGrath Goodman tracked down a 64-year-old man named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, a laid-off systems engineer who worked on classified defense projects back in the day, and decided his name plus his background made him Bitcoin. The story ran yesterday. Within hours there was a whole convoy of reporters camped outside this guy's house in the San Gabriel Valley, and when he finally came out he led a bunch of them on an honest-to-god slow speed chase through Temple City and Arcadia, ending with him having lunch with an AP reporter at the LA Press Club and saying, on record, "I am not involved in Bitcoin." Not "no comment." Not "I cant talk about it." A flat denial from a guy who by every account seems bewildered that his life just got turned inside out over a first and middle name.
I dont know if hes secretly Satoshi. Nobody outside a very small circle knows that, which is kind of the whole point of Bitcoin being designed the way it is. What I do know is that the evidence in the piece is thin as hell: the guy's actual first name is Dorian, "Satoshi" is his middle name from birth, hes worked on classified engineering stuff so he wont discuss a lot of his past by habit, and he ONCE told the reporter something that got reported as an admission and then immediately walked back once he understood what she was asking. Thats not a smoking gun. Thats a retired engineer getting cold-called about crypto by a journalist and answering in a confused, ambiguous way because who wouldnt.
And this is the part that actually bugs me, more than the shaky sourcing: it doesnt matter anymore whether hes right or wrong. A bunch of photographers now have his house. His neighbors know. His name is permanently glued to a several-billion-dollar payment network he apparently never uses (he told AP he'd never even heard of Bitcoin until his son mentioned the article). If it turns out in six months this was the wrong guy (and I'd bet money it is), nobody's going to run a correction with the same size headline. The retraction never travels as far as the accusation. Old rule, still true, doesnt matter that its 2014 and everything's supposedly faster and smarter now.
I mining bitcoin badly
I'll admit some bias here: I dabbled in mining back in late 2011, when I first started this blog, on a GPU that mostly just heated my apartment and generated maybe forty cents a day in coins I definitely did not keep long enough to matter. So I've had a low-grade interest in who Satoshi actually is for a while now, the way you have an interest in an unsolved local mystery. But "interest in the mystery" and "its fine to door-stop a random retiree and publish his home address adjacent details" are different things, and this week made that gap really obvious.
Small tangent because I cant help it: this is also, weirdly, the same week the App Store is an absolute graveyard of Flappy Bird knockoffs — I counted something like nine "Flappy ___" titles in the top 50 free apps this morning, none of them by the original guy, all of them the exact same twitchy pipe game with a different bird skin slapped on. Different flavor of the same story, honestly: something goes viral, and then a swarm shows up to extract value from it in the messiest way possible. Bitcoin bounty hunting and app store clone farming, same week, same energy.
Anyway. If it does turn out Dorian Nakamoto is Satoshi, fine, I'll eat the opinion. But "guy shares a name, wont talk about his classified work history, and got quoted out of context one time" is not journalism I'd want my name on, and I dont think Newsweek should be proud of leading its relaunch with it.