The Newsweek Credibility Matrix

> Leave a note in your will.

and sign it cryptographically

This right here is the problem with HackerNews, everyone is making CRUD apps but then they want to comment on what is genius & what is not. What is even funnier is that most people here can't even complete their side projects or main projects/MVPs etc, but want to trivialize bitcoin.

> Someone correct me if I am wrong but I don't think Bitcoin took genius levels of C++ or cryptography knowledge.

I think bitcoin is direct evidence of genius levels of C++, cryptography, and general software engineering knowledge. I'd place on par or better than git by Linus Torvalds (and as such I expect Mr Nakamoto to be someone much more like Linus than Dorian.)

The genius is in its relative simplicity, completeness, and effectiveness at both stating and solving the given problem. Upon seeing and understanding it (to the degree that I do), I'm curious at both who was able to invent it and what work it was that they built upon.

The question the article is trying to answer is not whether Newsweek was wrong - everybody knows they are wrong, now.

The question the article is interested in, is whether they should have known that they were wrong, before publishing. I think that was already a pretty obvious YES before this matrix was compiled, but there's some value in systematizing it.

Hi folks! I wrote the article (and woke up surprised to find it on HN).

I initially compiled this prior to Dorian's definitive written denial. Prior to that development, it genuinely seemed like the Newsweek article was going to (a) simply fade into obscurity and (b) never be retracted. The possibility of "b" was unacceptable, because without a final nail in the coffin, most news organizations would still treat it as though it were legitimate – e.g. referring to Dorian with phrases like "the alleged Bitcoin founder", and so on.

I think Dorian's written denial probably served as that final nail, but I still released this because despite the denials, I think Newsweek easily could have done the same research I did in compiling this, and come to this conclusion before they published the feature and damaged their rep.

"I find it kind of insane that so many people continue to expend any effort at all"

Oh come on now. Totally unfair.

"Unless they derive personal pleasure from it"

What's wrong if they do? What do people gain from watching football or answering other peoples questions at no charge on stack exchange?

"just write the author off forever as a journalist"

Are you saying the OP or the journalist at Newsweek?

Anyway I thought it was an excellent analysis (assuming of course the base facts are true...)

Your top comment is a put down in the vein of "anyone important wouldn't have time to do something like this". Like something a parent says to a child not recognizing that they might enjoy and gain benefit from something that the parent doesn't understand.

Not that simple. There's nothing about what Newsweek did that's in any way not standard operating procedure for just about every present-day journalist. Nobody checks facts any more, they've offloaded that responsibility onto us.

We put up with it because it's still easy enough for us to cognitively delude ourselves that there are still "good" outlets left, that conveniently line up with our personal partisan political views.

Journalism is no longer the art of being right, it's the art of being first.

It's an excellent exercise in critical thinking skills where you're weighing the support for two mutually exclusive conclusions. On a more social level, we all benefit from this sort of push-and-pull with investigative journalism because ideally, it pressures journalists to ensure their work is well-supported before press. In all likelihood, Goodman and Newsweek will always have the scars from this debacle in the end. Even if Newsweek's story was proved accurate in the end, the fact that their return to print was shrouded in this sort of controversy is beyond embarrassing.

I don't know, my dad is retired, used to work as an engineer and loves model trains. He doesn't know what bitcoin is. It really isn't that unusual for technical people to get out of touch with recent developments. A 64 year old Japanese immigrant with health problems almost certainly has very different sources of information to you and I. Also, the vehement denials are extremely consistent with Dorian Nakamoto being a grumpy old man who doesn't understand what is going on but doesn't like it and wants to be left alone. It just seems like he just wanted to get rid of the reporter and she heard what she wanted to hear.

You'd expect there to be at least one Satoshi Nakamoto with an engineering background. Dorian Nakamoto's career doesn't seem remarkable or unusual (or closely related to bitcoin). I would expect every single person on Hacker News to fit the profile for the founder of bitcoin as well or better than Dorian Nakamoto. The fact that he has the same name as Satoshi Nakamoto doesn't indicate anything, because you would expect Satoshi Nakamoto to be a pseudonym.

Dorian Nakamoto is a retiree who used to work on secret projects for the government. Why is there some mystery why anybody wants to be left the fuck alone let alone someone like Dorian?

Right. Someone with world class level c++ and crypto skills just happened to be unemployed for a decade and unable to pay his internet bills.

>There's no way an out of work computer engineer could not have heard of bitcoin until so recently unless he was living in a cave. The hype of bitcoin was quite large and pretty much anyone computer literate would have heard of it, especially a guy who's name is Satoshi Nakamoto.

Oh come on, that is just silly. I am positive there is computer literate people who haven't heard of bitcoin. Not everyone checks Hacker News, or news at all. I know I never watch/check the regular news, its extremely possible he never heard of it.

>Dorian was first informed of bitcoin through email, which means he likely could not have confused that word with anything else.

And not everyone has a good memory. The author could have asked him about bitcoin without explaining to him what it was which is why he didn't answer her questions, then he forgot what she was asking about, since it wasn't notable. Nobody is going to remember everything.

>Finally, his claim of the "accusation" hurting his job prospects are quite silly, since he's been out of work for more than a decade.

He has also had health problems in that decade which could have prevented him from seeking employment.

>Plus, it's pretty rare to be this vehement in your denials unless there actually is some truth to the accusation

Oh come on. He wants to be left alone! Of course he is going to be vehement in his denials so people will leave him the hell alone.

>Finally, his claim of the "accusation" hurting his job prospects are quite silly.

He is an immigrant. He might have a different cultural view than you over what hurts a job prospect. For example, I once visited a country where cheating in school was rampant. It was not only the norm, but completely socially acceptable, and it was though by the teachers that every student would cheat given the chance. Someone from that culture may not believe getting caught cheating would hurt their job prospects, for example. Stop looking at everything from your point of view. Furthermore, what's with the scare quotes in accusation? Even if the accusation is true, he was still publicly accused of being the bitcoin founder. It is irrelevant if the accusation is true or false, it is still an accusation.

I agree. Post the initial Newsweek article, it's the first balanced piece I've seen from the tech community. By comparison everyone else seems to be running around with their hair on fire.

I agree that this is better than most of the post-Newsweek followups I've seen; but it still has things I take issue with like suggesting that the real Satoshi wouldn't have money problems because he's worth $500M-$1B in bitcoin.

I'd love for someone to explain to me how someone would go about converting the early Satoshi stash of bitcoins into even just millions of real dollars over a timespan of less than a decade or two, because as far as bitcoin has come on a number of acceptance fronts, it just doesn't have that sort of real-world liquidity or transferability to USD (or something else that does have that sort of liquidity).

I looked at mage like that in the 80s and even then they were never reliable sources for anything. They were influential just because they reached mass audiences, and had a quality of "newsiness" or what's now called "info-tainment", but were always worthless for knowing what was going on.

In particular, the so called "news" magazines - and later the web and television media associated with the same big companies and others like them - had a remarkable talent for writing a whole article, sometimes a long one, with an authoritative tone in the prose, -and always with a "spin" that you might or might not notice - yet somehow never including any verifiable facts or figures, nor identifiable sources. The reader would get a vague impression of the topic and some claims about it, but never any glimmer of knowledge (edit:)(except maybe "big media companies want me to believe 'x', hmmm, why is that?").

You mean unbelievable?

Totally agree on the fluency, the real Satoshi's mother tongue is probably English.

Regarding age however, that's absolutely meaningless in this context, I know several people 50 or older that in text are indistinguishable from any younger generation. How you convey yourself in communication has more to do with your peer group and self image than your age. That sort of self-expression is particularly common in several generations techies, geeks, psychonauts, surfers, hippies and travellers.

Perhaps he's suffering from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder? History is full of brilliant geniuses with tough mental illnesses. With some speculation, you can most certainly create a scenario where it is at least possible the guy is the real Satoshi.

That sealed it for me, too. Satoshi and Dorian Nakamoto write like completely different people--so different that it's an unbelievably good false flag operation otherwise. Futhermore, Satoshi's style is appropriate to the demographic you expect of the creator of Bitcoin, and Dorian writes in a way consistent with what we know of him.

Wrong guy. If you want to find the real Satoshi, I'd start with the union of open source contributors, with an interest in early digital money, and a CS/math/ish grad student somewhere in the +1 to -10 years around 2007. Probably 30 to 40 years old now.

I think the academic angle (based on the use of a paper to announce the system) is pretty clear.

Many people have picked up on it, which is why I've read it in multiple places. It's noteworthy, but less so than you seem to imply: a denial is exactly what we would expect if Dorian was Satoshi, and if Dorian was not Satoshi. So it's all the other evidence, in my opinion, that damns Newsweek, and not the post from Satoshi.

Unless I'm reading wrong, this is mentioned in the third paragraph of the linked article.

Traction seems almost random on HN.

What? It has been on the HN front page - the day it happened. It was also mentioned in the article.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7358150

Couldn't that be Dorian himself who wrote that? It's not impossible at all if you think about it.