Linguistic Analysis Says Newsweek Named The Wrong Man As Bitcoin's Creator
forbes.com
forbes.com
"I have never communicated with bitcoins".
Did this man create the first distributed digital cryptocurrency? No. Instead, here's what happened: Newsweek senior writer Leah McGrath Goodman went scouring a database that contained the registration cards of naturalized U.S. citizens (for the record, Nakamoto is the ~400th most common Japanese name). "A Satoshi Nakamoto" then turned up who had a physics/engineering background. She interviewed the man's family, fabricated a few quotes implying involvement with Bitcoin (or took the quotes out of context, which is equivalent), and published a clickbait story destroying the man's privacy.
That's it.
Remember the "Heaven is real!" cover? (https://ksj.mit.edu/tracker/2012/10/heaven-real-doctors-expe...)
Remember "The Fall of France"? (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-sinclair/france-newsweek-...)
The main issue are the candidates. However, I believe that for this type of analysis exclusion of a certain candidate is much more reliable than finding the one who did it (as the article exemplifies)
I wonder if Dorian Satoshi used the same tactic. Once a journalist discovers him, he tacitly admits to being the Bitcoiner, then in his next public statement retracts this and says it was a misunderstanding. Now everyone's going about saying the real Satoshi would never have responded to the journalist like that.
Probably not but arguably it would be the best way to handle the situation if you wanted the story to blow over.
"I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it," he says, dismissing all further queries with a swat of his left hand. "It's been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection."
If we're going to play that game, for all we know, bitcoin was his previous, classified work, and there is no confusion at all.
Which is precisely the explanation he gave to AP
The number of sites I don't read on mobile anymore is increasing.
Has the expert actually ever tried his technique to infer the author of a white paper based on sample of correspondence?
And here's an excellent textual analysis of Satoshi's writing -- really quite convincing: https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-nakam...
The verdict? Nick Szabo, a professor of computer science at GWU and trained attorney, with significant expertise in the digital economy and smart contracts. He's got a fascinating blog at: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/
To be honest, I was convinced by this particular analysis back in December, but I haven't been passing it around because I respected Satoshi's desire for anonymity. However, now that an innocent man is being hounded and harassed, I think it's about time that the creator step up and claim his creation. We also need to know what happened to the Satoshi stash for this amazing project to move forward with greater certainty.
So I would encourage the real Satoshi to step up. I'm not at all convinced that Dorian Nakamoto -- albeit a pretty fascinating man -- is actually the creator of Bitcoin.
I do think Szabo is in a top-100 list of Satoshi candidates, and the most damning linkage is Satoshi's failure to cite Szabo, but it's far from conclusive.
The creator would have to balance his desire to protect Dorian's family against his desire to protect his own family.
I would take it with a few grains of salt.
edit: woops, I meant to link the original as well http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5315
http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November...
So you can compare Dorian's vs those where both include more off the cuff wrirings. Personally I think it's pretty evident that Satoshi Nakamoto has a better handle on English than Dorian. I also believe that a textual analysis of the white paper vs. other shorter writings by Satoshi Nakamoto would show a strong correlation, maybe even finding rare pairs, while Dorian's would not match strongly at all.
If, as alleged, he emailed her at 10:50pm the night before he went to press -- and then said "she could not be reached for comment" and/or "she did not respond" -- he was being either lazy or disingenuous in that regard.
Her Twitter comments make her sound petty, but at least one of her complaints seems legitimate. She felt that she got railroaded here.
In the past if you published crap you lost the high quality advertisers. Now advertisers just go where the audience is, like the Huffington Post and Business Insider. In other words, all journalists are gossip columnists now. Even better if they wrote for free.
But I see a bright spot in all of this. In a sea of crap, good content might glimmer on the surface, wherever it appears. There's been a serious backlash among the tech and journalism communities against content farms and clickbait. People are, once again, experimenting with quality. Whether quality will be able to last depends on whether anyone can figure out how to make money from quality, and that's the unfortunate truth of the matter. Meanwhile, content farming is a gravity well that seems to suck every new publication down into oblivion, slowly but inevitably. A tweak here, an optimization there, a formula plied and followed, and before you know it, you're writing emotionally manipulative headlines and minimizing costs (and quality), like everyone else. But wow, look at those shares and pageviews! :)
I guess I still have hope. Otherwise I wouldn't be involved in journalism right now. For my part: I don't trade in gossip. I don't write clickbait (though typically, and depending on the publication, I don't have editorial control over my headlines or promotional copy). I try to be interesting. I try to be thoughtful. I try to have standards. I have yet to make a serious living as a writer, and until that changes, writing will remain a part-time gig. But I'm an optimist.
I suspect that whoever figures out how to monetize quality writing will do it by reaching back to first principles, rethinking the idea of publishing altogether. Trying to prop up a digital business on the scaffolding of a centuries-old business model makes no sense.
Except for aaaaa his full name? If he was trying to be discreet, something tells me he wouldn't use his actual name.
Then just compile the tex to enjoy a beautiful laid out and professionally edited document.
1) Invent a disruptive technology that threatens the foundations of governments and traditional currencies.
2) Deliberately create a corpus of writing that doesn't look like your natural writing style to linguistic analysis.
3) Have a confederate arrange to have the press "discover" you hiding "in plain sight."
4) Someone "debunks" the discovery through linguistic analysis and you get away scott free.
2) Upload the idea at a semi-random time in the future, from a random location in a randomly chosen country, over a public network, using a computer bought with cash from a randomly chosen store. Have that computer link to it from as many places as possible.
3) Never speak about it.
-------------
If a highly weight goal of yours is not being found, then you limit your interactions, since you know that you'll leak information whenever you interact with something. And you randomise as many data points as you can think of that someone might correlate with you.
Then again, Satoshi obviously isn't doing 3 - assuming the Satoshi persona is the person who invented it.