So by now you've probably seen the Newsweek thing. Print Newsweek, back from the dead, and their big comeback cover story on Thursday was "The Face Behind Bitcoin": a reporter named Leah McGrath Goodman tracked down a 64-year-old guy in Temple City, California named Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto and basically said, this is him, this is the guy who invented Bitcoin.
And then it all fell apart in about six hours.
Dorian denied it, flat out, to basically every outlet that showed up on his lawn (and a lot of them did; there's video of him getting into a car and driving off with a pack of reporters chasing him down the street to an AP office, which is a genuinely bizarre image to have in your head on a Friday). Then yesterday the actual pseudonymous Nakamoto (or somebody with access to the old P2P Foundation account, anyway) posted "I am not Dorian Nakamoto" and that was more or less that. Reddit's Bitcoin community had a legal defense fund up for the guy within hours, which, credit to them, moved a lot faster than any newsroom fact-checking department apparently did.
I don't really care who invented Bitcoin. I've said that before on here and I'll say it again: I think the "who is Satoshi" hunt is mostly a parlor game for people who like puzzles more than they like currency, and the actual invention doesn't get less interesting or less useful if nobody ever pins a name on it. What bugs me about this story isn't the mystery. It's that a magazine looked at a private citizen with no public profile, no history of programming, an actual model train hobbyist by the sound of it, and decided the responsible thing to do was print his home address's general vicinity and let a scrum of TV vans show up while he was making lunch.
That's not investigative journalism finding a public figure who's been hiding. That's just doxxing with a fact-checker attached, and the fact-checker apparently didn't check very hard.
I get that Newsweek needed a splash. This was their first big print cover since they killed the physical magazine at the end of 2012, and "we found Satoshi Nakamoto" is exactly the kind of headline that gets you talked about for a week. Mission accomplished on that front, I guess. But there's a difference between a scoop and a guess dressed up with enough hedging language to survive a lawyer's read-through, and from what I've read of the actual piece, it leans a lot harder on "well he wouldn't confirm or deny it when I showed up unannounced" than I'm comfortable with. Wouldn't confirm or deny a lot of things if a stranger showed up asking about a $10 billion invisible currency I'd supposedly created under a fake name. I don't think that's evidence. I think that's just what a startled 64-year-old does.
Anyway. Separately, and much less depressingly, SXSW Interactive kicked off in Austin yesterday, and my Twitter feed is already the usual mess of panel humblebrags and people complaining about the taco lines. I've never actually gone — flights out of here always seem to spike right around this week, which I assume is not a coincidence, and I have a hard time justifying the badge price for a week of stepping over cables in a hotel ballroom. Maybe one year. Everyone I know who goes says the actual panels are the least important part anyway, it's all hallway conversations and parties, which sounds exhausting to me but I recognize that's a me problem and not a SXSW problem.
Also, completely unrelated, but I saw a listing this week for a used iPhone 4S on eBay going for something like $600 because the seller mentioned in the description that Flappy Bird was still installed on it. Six hundred dollars. For a two-and-a-half-year-old phone with, checks notes, a mediocre pipe game on it. I don't know what to do with that information except report it to you. The Flappy Bird gold rush apparently still has some life left in it three and a half weeks after Dong Nguyen pulled it from the store, which tells you something about how badly some people wanted a thing the second it became unavailable.
Not a lot of grand takeaway here today. Just a weird week for tech reporting and an even weirder week for secondhand phone pricing.