Given the frequency of these fraudulent or mistaken Satoshi identifications, it's probably time that someone puts together a simple, publicly visible procedure for verifying Satoshi's identity. Make a web-site, call it something like satoshi-test.com, and include a step-by-step procedure for journalists to follow. If they can't get their Satoshi claimant to complete the test, then they shouldn't write the story. If they ignore the test, then we should ignore their story.
Many journalists will jump on the opportunity even if they know that it is 100% fake.
I'm pretty comfortable with the technical competence of a subset of tech journalists -- nikcub is one of them. Other fields often get fairly competent journalists; tech journalism deserves the same.
The key thing here isn't necessarily technical competence but skepticism, which is the thing journalists are supposed to be oversupplied with.
That's... not really true, especially when it comes to stuff like Bitcoin, which even a lot of experts don't understand (remember, people in our field are still struggling to write CRUD web apps). Medicine, for example, has equally complicated areas (cancer, epidemiology). I can't speak from personal experience (I'm not an expert in that field) but I have friends who are medical researchers and they are equally frustrated with medical journalism.
Ultimately, what we need are people who are actual experts in fields to be writing about those fields for a general audience, and get rid of journalists who aren't experts.
One thing that medicine does better is regulation. With odd exceptions like abortion, regulation of how doctors do their jobs is managed by other doctors. I would love if that was how things were done in computer fields.
I agree -- we need people who are actual experts in the field, but also good at communicating, when communicating about topics where expertise is valuable. There are some amazing war correspondent journalists who go into harm's way and have both shared experience and a reasonable background.
Sure. Donate to NPR or sub to the WSJ :)
Bitcoin is a digital currency that is based on cryptography, specifically public-key cryptography. The way you spend money through Bitcoin is by using a private key that only you have access to to sign a transaction that sends Bitcoin to someone else. The rest of the network validates that transaction using the corresponding public key and rejects it.
Satoshi Nakamoto wrote Bitcoin. He mined the first block and authored the first transaction. As a consequence of this, several public keys are known that are recorded right into the very beginning of the blockchain. So anyone claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto should be able to digitally sign a message to that effect with the private keys corresponding to the known public keys, either a transaction on the blockchain or a simple text message.
Anyone who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto but cannot digitally sign proof to that effect is not Satoshi Nakamoto. The first thing the real Nakamoto would do should he ever come out publicly (which is highly unlikely) would be to provide this incontrovertible proof. As the creator of Bitcoin, he more than anyone knows that you can't take this kind of stuff on faith; it has to be proven mathematically.
The linked post shows the creator of Litecoin demonstrating that he is in possession of the private key corresponding to the genesis block of the Litecoin blockchain. It's really that simple. He has a private key, and he's signed a message that anyone can verify.
Welcome to Satoshi-test.com!
It needs to be something like "Please sign `<challenge string> + your name`"