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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

Here is what doesn't make sense about Dorian Nakamoto being the Satoshi behind bitcoin:

Here's a guy who code switches during conversations and emails to maintain either the secret identity of an old Japanese man living in CA and playing with model trains, or to maintain the secret identity of a sophisticated programmer who created a proof-of-work system called bitcoin.

But then this advanced guy maintaining a secret identity signs every message he posts to the internet with his real name?

Leah McGrath-Goodman found this secretive guy who people have been searching for for the laser few years by looking his name up in a phone book?

That doesn't really track.

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Many people like to picture the bitcoin inventor as some sort of god who knew everything in advance. The truth is in 2008/2009 (almost?) nobody was sure that bitcoin will succeed. Even Hal Finney(famous cypherpunk, who actively participated in the developing of the idea of the bitgold by creating RPOW: http://www.finney.org/~hal/rpow/ ), even Hal Finney was sceptical: "turned [bitcoin] off because it made my computer run hot" and "was surprised to find that it was not only still going, bitcoins actually had monetary value.[late 2010]"

It is probably that not only cypherpunks thought that bitcoin is nice but weird idea, but also Satoshi Nakamoto himself. True, if it takes off, Satoshi will change the world and make some money, but what if it doesn't? Then bitcoin is like bit gold or b-money -- cool theoretical concept, and Satoshi want some recognition for his work(just like Nick Szabo or Wei Dai who used their real names).

Of course there is some chance that bitcoin will succeed, so Satoshi wants to protect himself from government hostility. He knows about Liberty Dollar(don't confuse with Liberty Reserve), he knows about e-gold, and he knows about Phil Zimmermann(criminal investigation related to PGP).

So why does Satoshi need anonymity? Well, he doesn't. All he needs is _plausible deniability_, and he maintains it pretty well.

This whole thing reminded me of the lesswrong.com post on Amanda Knox [1]

Even the initial assumption that the creator of Bitcoin used his real name, contained in the headline, was extremely unlikely, and all other evidence was completely circumstantial. In my mind, it was nearly obvious that Dorian is not Satoshi after a few hours and was shocked to see that many believed the news story.

I'm still not sure if this was irrational on my part due to my own bias of preferring that Satoshi remain anonymous, or the irrationality of internet discussions is worse than I thought.

1: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1j7/the_amanda_knox_test_how_an_hour...

To be fair, Leigh claims that Satoshi unambiguously admitted to her his involvement with bitcoin, and she was supposed to be a reputable journalist.

This gave some justification for initially accepting the story at face value.

Untrue. Leigh claims that Satoshi "tacitly" admitted his involvement, in the most ambiguous part of an extremely ambiguous writeup.

This is hardly stated "tacitly":

  "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."

Your comment is very difficult to read.

>this is hardly state "tacitly":

>>"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."

>>-Dorian S. Nakamoto

"In that," he says. Not "in Bitcoin". Not even "in cryptocurrency." As Dorian claims in his letter, he thought Leah was asking about his classified work for the federal government, and he was merely saying that his years of doing classified work were behind him.

Are we somehow to believe that someone who can't even get the name of the currency right (he called it "Bitcom" repeatedly), is the inventor? Nothing in Leah McGrath's articles or the follow up interviews with the AP or in this letter suggests to me that Dorian Nakamoto is anything more than who he says he is: just an old engineer looking for work.

The Newsweek article, in my view, is a disgusting piece of yellow journalism produced by a hack journalist who was doing whatever it took to get a flashy cover story for Newsweek's inaugural issue. In that, it succeeded. But in establishing Newsweek's journalistic bona-fides or establishing Leah McGrath as a decent human being, it failed utterly.

I agree with you completely. I was attempting to point out that author of the article wasn't exactly beating around the bush and basically said Dorian admitted to being involved.

  Reporter: Tell me, are you the inventor of Bitcoin?
  Dorian: I don't want any trouble, please leave me alone.
  Reporter: As an engineer working for defense projects, 
            you clearly had the skill to build this type 
            of technology.
  Dorian: I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it,...

All the reporter had to do was click "voice memo" on her iPhone, and there would have no doubt as to what had actually transpired...

Actually, speaking of Amanda Knox & LW... http://lesswrong.com/lw/ju0/amanda_knox_redux_is_satoshi_nak...

the initial assumption that the creator of Bitcoin used his real name, contained in the headline, was extremely unlikely

I'm curious: Why do people actually believe that this is so unlikely? By the time that I first read about Bitcoin, it seemed to be already accepted canonical knowledge that Satoshi Nakamoto must be a pseudonym, and I guess I just accepted that. But now that this discussion has come up, I don't think I remember any positive argument to that other than "he does not like to talk about his private life" (not a particularly strong argument given the amount of discussion of private life in typical open source projects) and "the inventor of Bitcoin must be some pre-established genius, and there is no such genius named Satoshi Nakamoto" (also rather questionable, and quite contrary to the startup culture usually seen here).

Are those pieces of evidence enough to make the use of his real name "extremely unlikely"?

It's unlikely that it is his real name because (1) the name does not appear outside of Bitcoin in any mailing list or forum and (2) bitcoin.org was purchased with anonymity in mind

The entire fiasco reminds me of reddit's witch hunts to get the boston bomber, along with dozens of disasters in the past where innocent people have been indicted by them.

We're becoming a nation of people who can't think, but care not too much about that if others are going along with them.

We should support him, who cares who the founder is

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ztjmg/andreas_im_f...

Depends on how good he was at opsec and how seriously he was trying to be secret. If he had started it as a lark and only gotten worried about secrecy after thinking further, it wouldn't have been crazy to have used an obscured identity, one that would only be available to people searching obscure public records.

Of course it doesn't track. Satoshi Nakomoto always knew the last thing anyone would expect would be that his real name was Satoshi Nakomoto. It's a brilliant plan.

Or it is maybe just due to his quick visit with the nice people at Langley.

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