Being labeled Satoshi regardless of truth is pretty much going to get you robbed, kidnapped or killed. This dude lives in this town and has $400M of untraceable currency? The article gives his name, face, address and relatives. You can be sure as hell that somebody will do something stupid to try and get to it.
I wouldn't wish this label upon anybody, it's exactly why the community tries to avoid speculating about it. It's extremely irresponsible of the newspaper to publish this — truth or otherwise — especially in such vivid detail.
I hear Bitcoin advocates frequently claim that government has an interest in "shutting down Bitcoin", but compared to the all-cash industry of most organized crime, Bitcoin's pseudonymity is law enforcement's dream come true. A state actor would merely have to obtain the identity of one key in a series of transactions on the blockchain, and would gain far more information than any informant could provide. Sure, mixers and other methods could obfuscate this, but it's not like 7/11 tracks serials of hundred dollar bills, so the blockchain by definition is richer source of transaction data.
Full disclosure: I believe strongly in the concept of crypto currencies and Bitcoin, but do not own any coins/alt at the moment.
> Bitcoin's pseudonymity is law enforcement's dream come true. A state actor would merely have to obtain the identity of one key in a series of transactions on the blockchain, and would gain far more information than any informant could provide.
This is true. Bitcoin transactions has already been used as evidence in Sweden. In 2013 bitcoin transactions were evidence in at least 6 drug cases alone.
One thing that someone noted is that for a seller of illicit goods, bitcoin is better than paper in that with dollar bills you have to physically pick them up at one point.
With bitcoin, sure you can trace coins, but laundering services (namely things like exchanges) can make you disappear a bit quicker.
I love the idea that bitcoin is the beta test for a global cryptocurrency to replace all money in the future and it is created by the government to test this form of currency. They will regulate all transactions/exchanges and will be able to trace the life of every coin.
It's true. The blockchain is at best pseudoanonymous. If you are careful about how you get your coins, and use a high latency mixer (which don't exist as far as I know, but can be faked by multiple runs through a low latency mixer) and take your profits out slowly, you can make them quite anonymous. While they are a richer stream of data that a purely cash business, they don't have the same hassles (mostly physical size and security issues) as cash.
Blockchain anonymity is what Darkcoin is aiming to solve. Beta tests are currently ongoing on what they call Darksend, a method of anonymously transferring money between wallets.
The main issue here is that Newsweek is not a newspaper anymore. It was sold for a pitance to a small Internet only publisher named IBT media ans is now a glorified blog.
A recent article on France showed that fact checking wasn't part of the editorial process anymore...
At this pace, the name will be completely worthless within five years...
edit: well, it seems it is back in print just this week, but with very few printed
"Being labeled Satoshi regardless of truth is pretty much going to get you robbed, kidnapped or killed."
People say that a lot as it pertains to Satoshi, but I don't see any realistic basis for it except watching too many bad movies. Even if you had $400M in stolen bitcoin, how are you going to unload that quickly enough for the payoff to be worth murder/kidnap or whatever else? The Winklevii seem to have fulltime jobs getting PR on the fact that they hold $40M in bitcoin, what's the tipping point at which they will certainly be killed?
If a "feature" of bitcoin is that if you happen to get wealthy in it you're bound to be killed, well that's a pretty shitty feature of a currency. Luckily, the idea that this will happen is just hogwash.
The whole beauty of bitcoin is that because nobody is sure how to regulate it, you can steal/embezzle huge amounts of it and likely never get in trouble. Why fuck that up with the dirty business of murder and kidnapping, which are very clearly illegal?
Why are you so certain he will get robbed, kidnapped, or killed? There are many many people with $400M+ and their information is freely available online and in the media as well.
Their money is in banks. The existing financial system is much better at protecting peoples money from extortion and kidnapping than Bitcoin is: you can either request money in cash (and get arrested the moment you try and pick it up), or you can request a wire transfer to an account you had to give a passport to open up and where the transactions can be rolled back at any time.
The fear is that it's not actually safe to be rich in Bitcoin at the moment. In theory, this can be resolved through the use of tamper-resistant secure hardware (like the chips used in credit cards): you put your bitcoins under the control of such a device and then it's programmed to only allow small "cash" withdrawals to unauthenticated addresses, and it does risk analysis and requires authenticated addresses for everything else. But no such devices exist yet.
You can't hold all your wealth in a currency that is built to avoid government regulation and to send transactions around the world instantly (both of which would help in the event someone tried to rob/extort you) and then cry foul when you don't have any recourse for someone robbing or extorting you.
I'll never wish Satoshi (or anyone else) is robbed or extorted for his wealth. But just like you shouldn't keep millions of dollars under your mattress, maybe you should diversify your (considerable) funds to better protect yourself from single points of failure.
And many of them have protection. For instance ExxonMobil has security for its executives. They need it: one of their execs was kidnapped for ransom and stuffed alive in a box.
As I pointed out in the now dead earlier thread that while there's obviously privacy issues and Newsweek should have written the article without so many personal details there is clearly a public interest angle here.
If the article is accurate the bitcoin founder has a background working as a software engineer on classified US government projects, which makes it a public interest issue due to pre-existing concerns that a government could have designed bitcoin to have secret vulnerabilities/backdoors.
The pre-existing concern wasn't that the government wanted to backdoor the crypto (as they have done with BSAFE, etc.) rather that Bitcoin might have been invented by a government for their own reasons.
Obviously you can argue how likely that would be, but it's been widely discussed in the bitcoin community in the past and has been an issue of concern given there are "arbitrary" cryptographic decisions in the bitcoin algorithm design without clear reasoning.
Not that I think publishing his name and address was in any way a good idea, but how many US citizens from this list:
http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/#tab:overall
get "robbed, kidnapped or killed" each year?
Their money can't be irretrievably sent across the world instantly. You'd have to hold them hostage for at least a few days, make them sell all their shares and other holdings, wait for those transactions (which may well have tanked some stocks, leading a dozen reporters to your hostage situation) to clear, wait for the money to get into the bank, wait for the bank to transfer it to another account, and hope that at no point in the process anyone gets suspicious that a billionaire is liquidating everything and sending it to Eastern Europe.
I'm pretty sure that the real issue here is that if he starts spending his money he's going to get hit with a very large tax bill which he would rather not receive.
I'm not debating the affordability, I'm debating the wonderful crime-free world described by parent, where kidnappings and burglaries just don't happen.
That isn't, strictly speaking, true. It's certainly his right to refuse to comment, appear on camera, accept interviews, etc., but it's also Newsweek's right to say what they want about his life and his work. As long as they aren't writing falsehoods and don't cross the line into harassment, they're free to publish.
Oh, I agree with you. The Grantland thing from a bit ago is I think a better example than this Newsweek piece though. Here there's arguably a legitimate public interest served by knowing where this huge and valuable thing comes from. While it right on the border, and others may certainly disagree, I think it's a stretch to call this piece so far over that line as to merit outrage about it.
He used his real name. And a distinct name, at that. There are only 8 results on LinkedIn for "Satoshi Nakamoto", and at least one of them is a fake one. If he truly wished to remain anonymous. And despite this, it took journalists 5 years to find him. If he'd made up a name, he could have probably been anonymous for life. But he chose vanity over anonymity. And now he's an outed public figure. He can no longer sue for 'slander' and must instead argue the much more difficult case of 'libel'.
Minor correction. Slander is oral; libel is written. Nothing to do with public figures or not. The distinction you're looking for is that, for public figures (which may or may not apply in this case), actual malice--as opposed to just falsehood--may need to proven in order to get a judgement.
Could you explain how you think this right works, and to what extent it protects people aiming to effect the world from scrutiny by that world?
The US does have a right to privacy, but invoking to suggest nobody should have asked about Nakamoto suggests you are talking about something entirely different.
In it there is a section where he asks "Why would you want privacy anyway?" and this is exactly one of those reasons. You get labelled in some way, even if its not true, and that label sticks with you forever, potentially ruining your life or putting you in danger...
Not for nothing, but it's a bit ironic that you rail on against the irresponsibility of the paper for publishing this, then throw up a non pay-walled link to help ensure that people can access it.
I don't think Gavin is acknowledging that this is the real Satoshi (he cannot even know). He's just complaining about the doxing of the Nakamoto family, regardless of if this guy is or not the real Satoshi.
Doxxing? That is such a stupid term. It’s called journalism. Reporting on people with a huge impact on the world is sort of what journalists do. Of course that includes identifying information.
Sure, publishing identifying information of people who did nothing special is unethical but that can hardly be said about Satoshi. If the story is correct then this is some insanely rich dude who got rich by inventing Bitcoin which now got huge. I don’t think he needs you to defend him. (If any of this is incorrect her reporting is quite obviously highly irresponsible and unethical, but I’m assuming it is for now.)
This is what the Nakamoto family now has to worry about. It wasn't a random killing. There were at least 6 people arrested in connection with the murders. Apparently the robbers had people inside the bank who they were paying to alert them whenever someone withdrew large amounts of cash.
People get killed over money a lot. It's probably not paranoia. I would recommend you watch the video to understand the gruesome nature of what Nakamoto now has to live with.
So? Nakamoto can spend money on security too if he feels like it. As a cryptographer he's surely familiar with the adage that 'tehre's no security in obscurity,' and I'm only surprised it's taken this long to ID him.
64 year old post stroke retired government security contractor with a paranoid streak who doesn't want to talk to a reporter in any way shape or form to the extent he called the police as soon as she shows up and the evidence she wants us to take as an admission that he is whom she thinks he is is a couple of sentences of dismissive talk about no longer being involved in "that thing".
I find it had to believe that was actually the admission she made it out to be, considering the lengths the real Satoshi took to remain anonymous, it just doesn't make sense that is the venue he would choose to voluntarily rescind his until now well maintained anonymity.
Taken altogether all we have is a collection of completely circumstantial evidence coupled with plenty of things that suggest he is not the real Satoshi and the sole final admission is supposedly hurriedly made in an offhand manner direct to a reporter whom he clearly does not want to have anything to do with.
This wasn't a random robbery though. This was a systematic killing involving dirty banking employees who sent people to hunt them down. The connection is that $20,000 is a ton of money in Ecuador, and Nakamoto has a ton of money, so Nakamoto now has to worry about being hunted.
Yes, but he's not the only person in LA with a net worth that large. And people who hold a large amount of stock in a company are in a similar situation.
> And people who hold a large amount of stock in a company are in a similar situation.
Initiate a Bitcoin transfer at the same time as a stock sale followed up by a bank transfer from your brokerage and let us know which one finishes faster.
Plus, the brokerage and the bank can choose to hold and/or reverse your transactions, for reasons like "hmm, we should probably see if Bill Gates really meant to sell all his Microsoft shares..."
There are not many people sitting on tens/hundreds of millions of dollars in a format that you can store in your house and send irretrievably to a guy in Eastern Europe in an instant.
Seriously. Isn't this the reason why we pay many billions of dollars each year for the rule of law? If you're an exceptional case that needs extra security, get extra security.
Except his actual net worth is probably a fraction of what his theoretical net worth is. It's assumed for instance that he still has access to all those bitcoins, but something could have happened to that wallet. There's also the difficulty of actually converting those coins into something the average business will accept. It's like suggesting that handing someone a billion dollars in un-vested bonds suddenly makes them a billionaire, but in reality there not really any richer currently than they were before, although in some theoretical future they might be (assuming they hang onto the bonds till they vest and can cash them in).
Fair point. It's a tricky situation. But, hey, sometimes, life hands us lemons. I'm sure there are many reasonable solutions. Perhaps not his preferred solution, but solutions nonetheless.
I understand the fear, but the article seems to clearly say that he has less than any aging engineer -- I’d say with his actual name out there, he was a target, but no more. If anything it ties him to Federal security people, who tend to scare random Ecuadorians.
More importantly, ‘doxx’ing covers two situations:
* bad individual actors (disrespect in a public space, violence against weaker beings) where the outrage is the motivator; it is often wrong to make those information public, and the investigation should rapidly fold and forward its conclusion to law enforcement; it's not journalism, or gutter-journalism at best, and even low-level rags do it properly;
* people with significant impact, but whose role requires anonymity (or rather: empathic pseudonymous steganography): leakers, etc. Revealing their motivation but not their identity is good journalism. I agree that in Satoshi Nakamoto’s case, revealing details about his life adresses key issues (BitCoin public image; the incredible dedication of so many, humility and gender-role in technical fields) against his will. This article, hopefully will take away the unwanted attention from his back, focus BitCoin as an open-source project with contributors, and a product-vision that was grown/twisted by Andersen’s more clear and open views.
However, there is a word that is morally loaded and useful to describe the irresponsible behaviour of 4chan and ‘Flesh search engines’. It’s distinct from good journalism. This article is the later, not the former -- but it’s very much on the edge. The journalist could easily have avoided mentioning the location, or said that the name was a pseudonym or a mispelling.
> "Sure, publishing identifying information of people who did nothing special is unethical but that can hardly be said about Satoshi."
This is wrong on so many levels. Here is a guy who created arguably the largest financial innovation of the century and who only wants to be left to live a humble, private life instead of claiming his riches, and you think that a mass of curious strangers have a right to intrude into his life, jeopardizing his safety and that of his family just so you can have the satisfaction of putting a face with a name?
Journalism isn't the same as stalking. This is a man who clearly values his privacy and who had it compromised by his own overly talkative family and by questionable actions on the part of Newsweek (note that they carefully omit how they acquired his email from the model train website). Your response encapsulates everything that is wrong with celebrity voyeurism in America.
I would argue that there is in fact a public interest in learning more about the inventor of what is "arguably the largest financial innovation of the century". Learning more about his life and others involved in bitcoin can help us understand the motivations of the individuals that led to its creation. The fact that a man who worked in classified government projects for a long period of time went on to create bitcoin is certainly interesting.
My impression from the article was that all other interviews were given very freely. There's nothing unethical about asking Satoshi's family or those he worked with in creating bitcoin about him. I don't think there's anything wrong with posting his picture either.
Granted, the article could have done with a less-revealing picture of his house. But given the prevalence of things like Google street view etc., I'm not sure you can reasonably expect to keep that stuff secret.
They could also simply be decent human beings and not post his address or a picture of his house at all, much less what kind of car he drives and its license plate.
Right now there is nothing stopping any crook smart enough to set up a bitcoin wallet from breaking into his house and demanding Nakamoto transfer some or all of his bitcoins to it. Most wealthy people keep their wealth in banks, but the keys to Nakamoto's wealth are probably on a hard drive in that house.
The transaction would be on the public blockchain, but it would be irreversible and difficult to follow after enough mixing.
I agree the picture of the house with the car's license plate is pretty slimy, but I think we're just going to have to disagree about whether or not mentioning the city he lives in and the make of his car is unethical.
I agree with you there. If that was all they included, it would offer the reader a meaningful context of his life without compromising his privacy and possibly safety.
Like you, I'm a little amazed at the notion that we should collectively work assiduously to preserve the anonymity of people who have set out to have a substantial effect on the public sphere.
I think average citizens have a substantial right to privacy. But it sounds crazy to me that we shouldn't be able to ask questions about the people behind major news items, people changing the world we live in.
That's especially true in this case given that the guy used his own freaking name. Presumably somebody with a security clearance working on a cryptocurrency knows the implications of that. Yes, as a nerd I too am uncomfortable when I become the center of attention. But the whole world is not obligated to tip-toe around my personal discomforts.
The press has a lot of knowledge of high interest to the public that they never publish for various reasons.
Sometimes they can't prove a relation, other times they don't feel the public can deal with the information and finally sometimes they are simply asked not to post it.
the primary kind of stories where this is normal is with politicians.
In other words. You argument would have some more weight if it was used everywhere else too.
The press always have a choice and they also did here. It's not in the public interest to figure out who the creator of bitcoin is. It serves no purpose. It ads no value to bitcoin.
You don't live in a libertarian society so that means very little.
The fact is that the press often hold back from releasing information often hold back from using Bill of rights. They should have been more careful here.
Well, who enforces tort law? The guys with the guns stealing the money from all of us. A government strong enough to suppress the free press is strong enough to oppress the liberties of us all. Etc. etc.
Calling Newsweek 'trash journalism' to shred it of press protections won't do either, as otherwise that would put Wikileaks at risk.
Even if the conclusion of the article is wrong I don't see how you introduce legal liability in the face of the Peter Zenger trial, as long as the facts presented were true (or reasonably believed to be true).
Talking to one's relatives and co-workers is not a crime, after all (and how could it be otherwise; should the government regulate who we can speak to?).
> Journalists always have a choice and they constantly keep stuff out of the public.
Sure. And while I disagree with giving away the guy's address (or information that would lead directly to that), I don't see any other reason why Newsweek shouldn't have tried to track down Bitcoin's creator.
Certainly that's a more compelling story than the normal drivel that hits the media nowadays, so it's hard to argue that Newsweek was filled with higher-value stories that they had to shove aside for this one.
This is an actual attempt at investigative journalism, even if the person they decided to investigate wasn't to your personal liking. Any other news story and people would be claiming "the people have a right to know".
If you take away revealing his personal location (though even that would hardly be difficult to find) I don't see the problem here. The enigmatic Sakamoto was a figure of wide publicity before this story, which is why Newsweek spent money to track to track down his location. And as the creator of a market now worth probably a billion+ (if not more) it's hard to argue that the public has no moral right to investigate more.
Did I do anything of note that would make any of this information interesting to the public? I think I did not. If you want to put the work in and find all that out you are free to.
I never once said that everyone should actually provide journalists with that information just like that. They still have to put the work in. Do that if you want to, but I don’t think you will find anything interesting.
So a person loses their right to privacy when enough strangers take an interest in them?
Nakamoto barely provided Newsweek with any information at all. The rest was obtained (possibly illegally?) by snatching his email from a website he had done business with. After that, she pretended to have an interest in trains to spark a conversation and get initial information. She then stalked him and interviewed his family.
You don't have a right to privacy. Perhaps you should, and I've argued in favor of a constitutional amendment to that effect, but in the meantime privacy is just a polite social fiction.
It's more than a polite social fiction. It's a moral requirement for many of the rights guaranteed by the US Constitution to have any meaning. E.g. try exercising your right to an attorney when the prosecution logs all your communications. Or try exercising your right of assembly to discussion union membership while your employer monitors the meeting. If Americans give up on privacy and decide it's not worth fighting for, they will eventually cede the rest of their rights as well. There are simply too many powerful interests with strong incentives to create a world without a right to privacy.
And the legal scope of those situations is correspondingly narrow. I'm not against a right to privacy, which is why I said I'm in favor of a constitutional amendment to make it explicit. I'm saying that you don't have a comprehensive right to privacy now. Moral rights are what you want, legal rights are what you actually have.
I don't thinkt eh right to privacy is entirely unilateral; if it were, journalism could not exist, and the Constitution also forbids the government from abridging the freedom of the press - which includes the freedom to inquire as well as to publish. I personally would narrow the scope of press freedom if I were drafting constitution 2.0, because I believe publishers often exploit the economic asymmetry between themselves and their subjects to the detriment of ordinary people in a manner that the framers of the constitution were unable to envision, but there you go.
> " Moral rights are what you want, legal rights are what you actually have."
This sounds like a purely philosophical disagreement, so I won't pursue it much. From a practical perspective, I partially agree with you. A right without any teeth to back it up isn't much use in practice. In constitutional forms of government, it's the law that provides the teeth (as law ultimately devolves into a question of how and when force can be used, and against whom). But a more cynical perspective is that the teeth are all that really matter, and the moral arguments are all justifications for getting teeth in the first place. It's that latter, more cynical perspective that I am opposed to.
> So a person loses their right to privacy when enough strangers take an interest in them?
Depends on why strangers take an interest in them. I think it is reasonable to say that Nakamoto has made himself a public figure [1], so journalists should be able to research them within the confines of the law.
If I understand your comment, you believe you are ok with sounds posting that list of sensitive private information, but only if he "put the work in" to find it. I guess thats the only reason you don't post all of that information publically yourself. Your information is clearly interesting to the public, look a member of the public specifically asked for it.
How about if I compensate you, is that a reasonable substitute? How much would you charge in exchange for publishing every item on that list?
I suspect you will find that there is some information that you'd rather not divulge on the open internet, where there is no shortage of crazies. Some of that info would be useful for identity fraud as well.
A. You have to put in the work and actually find stuff out. That’s what journalists do.
B. You have to report on something relevant and interesting to the public. Some random person who didn’t do anything of any note is not relevant. Publishing identifying information on them is unethical. Publishing identifying information on someone hugely influential is very much ethical.
> Publishing identifying information on someone hugely influential is very much ethical.
How can you even say that? It's easy to say that if (assumption) you haven't done anything "hugely influential", but I think the feeling would be different if this article was about you.
It's plain disrespectful. The guy obviously wants to be left alone or he wouldn't have stopped emailing, stopped answering the phone or called police when the reporter showed up.
That's basically what keeps the paparazzi in business, yes. There's a reason the First Amendment rights were listed first, as well, which is the same reason the Guardian has been doing much of their Snowden coverage out of their New York office; press freedom is a big deal, even when that's inconvenient for you...
Since we're talking ethics, rather than legality, do you believe it's ethically sound to post someone's personal details, and then make (possibly false) claims about them that may compromise their safety?
> Since we're talking ethics, rather than legality, do you believe it's ethically sound to post someone's personal details, and then make (possibly false) claims about them that may compromise their safety?
I don't think it's ethically sound to post his address, license plate information, city, etc. Especially since it leads to crazy media car chases and other sorts of paparazzi-style insanity that I wouldn't wish on anyone, let alone a guy who just wants to be left alone.
I'm also partial to arguments based on safety. It was one of the many reasons I was opposed to what Bradley Manning did, for instance.
However the risk to those affected by Manning was much larger than the risk to Dorian, and in any event I can't remember many people on HN saying before not to post stories about rich people since the unwashed thugs might stick a shiv in them and rob them.
Thanks for your honest answer. I'm of the opinion that it's legal (first amendment, etc), but rather unethical, especially since the evidence isn't conclusive.
Regarding safety, currency stored in banks tends to be less susceptible to theft via coercion. If someone breaks into a house, holds a person at gunpoint, and demands their bank details, they probably won't be able to successfully transfer a few million dollars out without triggering some internal check. On the other hand, you could easily do that with bitcoins, assuming that the private key hasn't been locked up in a vault, or the transaction secured with multiple keys.
I still feel it's an unlikely scenario, but it seems that claiming someone has $400 million in untraceable digital currency is going to impact their safety more than claiming they have $400 million in a bank, or in shares.
> If someone breaks into a house, holds a person at gunpoint, and demands their bank details, they probably won't be able to successfully transfer a few million dollars out without triggering some internal check.
While that's true I suppose, whose fault is it for designing a system that is so much more susceptible to "rubber-hose theft"? It seems to me that this threat model would apply equally to anyone who gets rich via Bitcoin, not just Nakamoto, and it's an inherent side effect of refusing to allow banks to act as a trusted third party.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Should investigative journalism be forbidden from here on to anyone who has enough Bitcoin? Because if it's true that being rich will get you physically robbed then how many Bitcoin startups have founders and officers that are in mortal peril based on their Bitcoin holdings? Surely we can't apply a blanket "no investigate" order across them all.
Rather I believe that, if this is a viable threat, that it's an unintended consequence which is essentially inherent to the new marketplace Nakamoto created, which is something that anyone publically known with Bitcoin riches will have to cope with in the future.
It's not too difficult to protect Bitcoins from "rubber-hose theft". The simplest solution is to keep the private key to the majority of the wealth in a bank vault, or several.
If Newsweek got it right, then Satoshi has a number of options for securing his wealth, assuming he still has the private keys. But if Newsweek got it wrong, there's nothing Dorian Nakamoto can really say, other than to deny the story.
Consider if Newsweek ran a story about a secretive millionaire who supposedly has millions in gold stored in his basement. If the subject of the investigation does have millions, but they are stored more sensibly, he could release a statement saying that, yes, he has gold, but its stored in banks, not in his basement. But if Newsweek are wrong, they've compromised the security of an innocent individual.
Society? People have always wanted to know who Nakamoto was in real life and would consider creating Bitcoin something of note. Any news story about Bitcoin in the past couple years have included something about the mystique of Nakamoto.
The number of page hits the article gets? Come on - Bitcoin is news, and it's been made news by people like us. Don't be too surprised or appalled when the general media tries to latch on to the publicity train.
Most of that information is already available on the open Internet, given someone's full name, which many people use (or don't go to great effort to hide) on the Internet.
Given my full name, you can figure out, in about ten minutes, where I live, pictures of my house and my car (thanks, Google), the amount of property taxes I pay and the value of my house, my approximate net worth, my family, my academic history, partial work history, and many other details I would personally prefer the Internet to not know. All this is easily available on open public Internet sites.
And that's me. I make a concerted effort to remain pseudonymous on the Internet. I don't have a Facebook. I think you'd be surprised what people can easily find out about you if they want to.
What I do find interesting is the dichotomy between what I perceived to be the HN majority opinion in the story about license plate tracking and this story. In the former, it seemed to me that most people declared that privacy was basically dead and we should get over it; it was perfectly legitimate to collect public data regardless of whether the aggregation of that data led to information that many people would consider an invasion of privacy. Indeed, many commenters justified this point of view by saying that, essentially, data collection didn't really introduce any new problems, it just made it easier to get caught lying (e.g. having an affair) which is your fault since you shouldn't be doing it anyway.
But here many people (perhaps it is entirely a different set of people) clearly feel that the opposite is true: individuals, even those who may be involved in very public projects, have a powerful right to privacy. Or is it just that we feel its OK for companies and individuals to buy and sell information but less OK for the media to publish the same information wholesale? If so, why? At least when the media publishes my information, I know what you know. If people are buying and selling my information, I don't know what they know about me, I don't know what they're doing with that information, I don't know if its accurate, and I don't know how that affects decisions that companies and governments make about me.
I especially find the argument that we shouldn't publish the information about Satoshi because it puts him at risk interesting. I think most of us dismissed the same arguments when it came to informants identified in the Wikileaks documents.
I don't buy the "seeking attention" argument: many celebrities and people in positions of power aren't seeking attention and fame - it's a side effect of the job, or something they have done. The case is no different for them than it is for Satoshi.
Well let's hope that everyone else in the world becomes as uninteresting and uncontroversial as you, so they enjoy the comfort of de facto privacy. So what if all human progress grinds to a halt?
Journalism exists in part to put the powerful under the microscope. They have many more resources to hide their activities and to defend their interests than average folks, and don't need to be protected from public scrutiny.
Maybe he doesn't have access to his million dollar fortune. Maybe he lost the keys. Maybe someone else used his name and he is the Satoshi but not the creator. He is certainly not living as someone with hundreds of millions in the bank. In what way did he lose any right to be protected from public scrutiny (assuming anyone does have that right - I'm not sure they do)?
By making something that's used by vast numbers of people to channel huge amounts of money.
Journalists need to be able to go after stories like this because otherwise our society will be much worse. They have editors. They have review boards. We're not talking about 4chan or reddit lynch mobs here.
Maybe he is the wrong guy. How is he going to prove he didn't invent Bitcoin? Especially if he has done classified work. He clearly doesn't want attention. He couldn't have made that more clear. And he still has a right to a private life. I don't agree with your suggestion that creators don't have rights.
I am not suggesting to stop journalists investigating who people are. But this is clearly someone who does not want attention. This could easily turn into a 4chan or reddit lynch mob. You only need a few Mtgox victims who want to enact revenge. Or criminals hoping of forcing him to pay hundreds of millions in blackmail. To a possibly innocent person.
To be clear, this story could have been done without printing his whole address, car number plate, unblurred pictures of himself and his family etc.
> He is certainly not living as someone with hundreds of millions in the bank.
Thats because he doesn't have hundreds of millions in the bank. He has it in a random internet conceived currency. I'd seriously like to see him (or anyone for that matter) try and realize $1MM in Bitcoin in actual USD.
Good luck with getting your 1000 payouts of $1000 at a time spread over the course of 2 weeks per payout.
The whole point is that it paints a huge target on his back. And he isn't even using that 400m to do anything deserving of vigilante/criminal attacks, and no one knows if he even really has it
I did a quick Google search and found plenty of information about Bill Gates, including pictures of his house.
In fact you can do this with just about anybody. How and why is he at more risk than any other multimillionaire for whom all this information is public?
Bill Gates uses his money. That means that he can use some of his money on security.
He would be in much more danger if he neither used his money nor kept his money in institutions that would raise alarms to authorities if you tried to force him to withdraw all of it.
You assume he could. He may not actually still have access to it.
This situation isn't really comparable to the general public learning that somebody may or may not have a few million in investments and savings accounts. It is closer to the general public (excluding the police) learning that somebody may or may not have a few kilos of coke stashed somewhere in their home.
This hypothetical bitcoin wealth, and the hypothetical coke wealth differs from hypothetical 'traditional' wealth in that they can be burglarized or extracted via torture without attracting outside attention.
The blockchain is visible to all... of course it would attract outside attention.
But only if Nakamoto were actually able to spend it! If he's not able to spend it then he can't hire security I guess, but that would also put him at much lower risk of being burglarized for goods he can't give up. The important thing would seem to be making it clear he doesn't have access (that is, if he doesn't).
Taking the wallet would not attract attention. Only transferring the coins would, and that could be done hours, days, weeks, hell even years after you've finished beating Satoshi with a wrench in his basement. You could be on step "Getaway" before the rest of the world was notified that something was going on.
Stealing the fortunes of conventional multi-millionaires however necessarily involves interacting with the outside world at the time of the theft. Unless they are drug dealers anyway... there is a reason that drug dealers get hit by thieves so often, and it isn't only because the thieves know they will hesitate to contact police.
If he can no longer access the coins (either because he intentionally destroyed the keys, or because he neglected backups), then proving that to be the case would be damn near impossible. In this hypothetical case, Satoshi may very well believe that he has a better chance of making it unclear that he is actually Satoshi.
What makes you say that? It seems wildly speculative (at least, far more than the opposite opinion of believing he likely still has the coins he's believed to own).
When you develop software based on your own novel framework, wouldn't you need to do several test-runs, performance runs, sanity runs in the process? Do you keep all the intermediate debug data? I know I don't. In this case bitcoins would be part of the intermediate data.
I'm all for the "fuck celebrities and their privacy wishes" attitude, but only when it's those who actively choose to become famous. Satoshi didn't ask for any of this, so I highly respect his right to privacy. Furthermore, he's not famous, he's infamous. I wouldn't wish his current position upon my enemies.
Yo, demo9898, that was hilarious. I sadly can’t respond directly to you since your haphazard summary of what I said in the past on this site is marked dead.
Most of the stuff you list that I explicitly said about myself is spot-on (mostly because I explicitly said it) or at most slightly out of date, but all the inferred stuff is garbage. I’m pretty sure I could be identified with what I said here. Maybe. Probably. You, however, were running down all the wrong paths. Doing it properly would require some more amount of work.
I guess that shows there is more to investigative journalism than reading a bunch of stuff someone wrote somewhere pseudonymously. And I’m still not sure why anyone would actually be interested in me and would want to publish anything about me. It’s not like I invented Bitcoin.
(Also, man did I say some aggressive bullshit in the past. Sorry about that. People change, you know, or at least recognise that their past opinions were bullshit. I think that would be about the worst thing: Pointing out dumb things I said in the past. That really stings. But it’s all public anyway, so I don’t care too much. Humans aren’t perfect.)
This dude lives in this town and has $400M of untraceable currency?
It isn't untraceable, and by consensus the Bitcoin community could de-list all of the origin block mining outputs. Alternately the creator could simply say that he deleted the private keys, which it seems likely that he probably did. They have always hung like a stench over the currency, people wary that one person holds so much of the reserves, with the ability to collapse the market completely at any time.
I don't quite get the outrage about this article. He used his real name on the original paper, and he did something famous. That makes people look for him.
The article sounds like it makes some leaps, however. He worked in shadowy areas, so that is proof that he is the original author? Where is the actual proof beyond innuendo? Someone tacitly saying "it is me" can as likely be someone looking for a little excitement and attention. It's also weird that he refuses to talk, but then his children are gregarious about it.
I wouldn't wish this label upon anybody, it's exactly why the community tries to avoid speculating about it. It's extremely irresponsible of the newspaper to publish this — truth or otherwise — especially in such vivid detail.
Article sans paywall — http://archive.is/wbw97
Gavin seems to acknowledge the article — https://twitter.com/gavinandresen/status/441547758827474946