Well, there are multiple people here, so differing views aren't really inconsistent.
But it's also possible to believe that certain government powers should be very limited while at the same time believing that individuals should strive not to be assholes to each other.
This is a private board, we are guests here. Even boards dedicated to discussing free speech regularly regulate the speech on their board because they need to keep peace. It's a big Internet, and you can make your own space.
Second:
I don't know how the people who run HN have ever claimed to be special free-speech proponents. They probably think, like most Americans can be shamed into thinking, that the government shouldn't punish you for speech, but aside from that I'm not aware of them, say, calling out other message boards for regulating their content as "censorship."
Third:
Unfortunately, once a general-purpose journalism piece lists your information, that's usually where claims of "doxxing" end.
Flagged as a troll, if you're genuinely suggesting what you write, consider that we can desire dissemination of public information or of government & corporate actions without believing individuals have no right to privacy.
Why not? There is absolutely nothing inconsistent about simultaneously believing "people should not do X" and "the government should not prevent people from doing X".
HN may be user-driven, but it's heavily moderated, privately run and those operating it have a long established policy of banning and deleting content (or sometimes entire sources, e.g all of Gawker Media) at will for any reason they see fit. Same applies to discussion and the 'ghosting' of specific users with poor reputations. There's no guidelines for what's 'allowed' and 'disallowed' (at least none they've committed to) so bans are completely arbitrary and usually carried out with no official explanation or notification. This is actually standard operating procedure for any moderated discussion board and HN's particularly aggressive stance has contributed to it's success - higher quality content, higher quality discussion. Slashdot operated under similar rules and enjoyed success for at least a full decade despite the same complaints of 'censorship' coming up constantly. Slashdot eventually fell apart for unrelated reasons (shrinking/aging audience, failed attempts at modernization) but it's still a proven model with plenty of precedence. If you're concerned that you're being intentionally kept from reading about something, get your technology-related news from multiple sources. There's plenty of sites with looser guidelines to choose from.
One thing that annoys me about HN though is that I read it primarily through Feedly, and content often gets pushed to HN's feed prior to deletion, so I end up with a lot of annoying dead links to HN in Feedly.
I like subscriptions, I just don't care enough about Newsweek to subscribe. Can't we have ads, with a payment option to remove ads? Ars Technica does this https://arstechnica.com/subscriptions/
Just block cookies from them, it works on most sites with a similar set-up.. Some sites you have to set to remove when you close the browser instead though.
Wait, it was just a single smart dude whose actual real name is Satoshi Nakamoto, and here we've been theorizing shadowy pseudonymous cabals of libertarian cryptographers?
I always assumed it was a real dude, since only a certain type of westerner would use a Japanese pseudonym, and that type of westerner would have chosen "Kenichi Kusanagi" or something similarly ridiculous.
[To be clear, I had also assumed that a Japanese crypto person who wanted privacy would have used a western pseudonym.]
But yeah, it almost seems like the crypto community didn't really want to dox Nakamoto, even if many of them could have.
Was he "put off"? He seems to have consented to the interview, and to have posed for a picture.
Having interacted enough with bad members of the media [NB: there are also good ones], I'm not so naive as to think that there's no way they could have persuaded him to do it with lies or bullshit or empty threats, but without evidence for that he could have just said "I don't want to talk to you" and left it at that.
EDIT: I've re-read and might be changing my position. He didn't actually consent to any in-person interview. It was very very clear he didn't want to talk in person. So where did the picture come from?
I am now unsure of that and backing away from that position.
Is there a print-version of this article? That would show the photo credit in the margin. Too bad photo credits don't seem to be the custom on the web.
the best part of the interview is when she says she used a team of investigators similar to the CIA, and then goes onto thank only 2 people for their work. hilarious.
Forget Dangerous... it's down right irresponsible They list the guys entire family including kids and where they work etc.
Beside that the article has very little content other than "he's a little bit weird" an observation that is not exactly original, it's almost a stereotype that really smart people are often a "little bit weird" .
That's exactly my point. It's dangerous because she's made his address, car registration and all his family's details public. I'm saying we should raise it with the people responsible if we think it's a problem.
edit: now you've edited for clarity, it's clear we're saying the same thing.
Are you missing the part where his family happily talked to the reporter?
Brother: "My brother is an asshole. What you don't know about him is that he's worked on classified stuff. His life was a complete blank for a while. You're not going to be able to get to him. He'll deny everything. He'll never admit to starting Bitcoin."
Daughter: "He would keep his office locked and we would get into trouble if we touched his computer," she recalls. "He was always expounding on politics and current events. He loved new and old technology. He built his own computers and was very proud of them."
They basically published not only his full name and home address, but that of his whole family. What journalistic purpose does that serve?
They could have written exactly the same story, but without giving away exactly where he and his family lives, and it wouldn't have suffered in any way.
We already knew his full name. You can find the family names of the Wal-Mart family also. Could Newsweek done it better? Yes, but his address would have become public within days of this story being published. Posted on reddit maybe with in hours.
The photo of the house and the car is extraneous, I agree. However, there is he, apparently posing for a photo. This is a man who decided to use his own family name in the Bitcoin papers, and the journalist simply searched people with the family name to find a decent match and did a lot of leg work.
I'm not sure it's a photo she or Newsweek took. If this was a print article there would be a photo credit. Maybe she found it somewhere?
In the article she says she only saw him once with the cops, and then had a very very short discussion with her when cops were present.
If the photo implies (as it did to me and apparently you) that he consented to an interview he didn't actually consent to, that's misleading journalism.
If the article is correct, Nakamoto only spoke to her in person at his house and with the police present. The photo would have to have been taken by a family member or some other person, and acquired by the author through someone else (probably family).
I don't think it's petty at all to link to publicly available information, when others have requested that information. Google-fu differs between individuals.
I do find it particularly petty that someone would go to great lengths to expose the private details of the life of a man who just wants to be left in peace.
Well that line of reasoning is exactly what I was referring to. The reporter doing due diligence and fact gathering is in ill taste, but responding in kind and releasing personal information about her is justified? That doesn't hold water, logically. I don't think anyone is that naive. It's alright if you're upset about divulging Nakamoto's personal details, it's the tit-for-tat mentality that comes across as childish.
Well there seems to be some misunderstanding about who released what. I have not released anything because I didn't have to.
All I have done is link to some items that she released into the public domain on a previous occasion.
Sharing the stupidity of others is a long-lived internet tradition. It's almost adage status; be careful what you post, it may come back to haunt you later. The same is true of this, I suppose.
So it's OK for you to use your Google-fu, but not for her to do the same thing?
I, for one, am quite interested to know more about Satoshi Nakamoto and this article is responsive to my curiosity about him. As someone else has pointed out, a great deal of information is public anyway in the form of property tax records and what not. If this were not the case I would get much less direct mail.
I really don't think this is appropriate material in the comments of an article about Satoshi Nakamoto. If you want to write an article about the Author's important contribution to the history of Bitcoin which includes her home address, you might have a leg to stand on.
> If you think this article is a dangerous invasion of privacy, tell her and her employers (Newsweek).
How adorable! You think Newsweek is going to give Leah a talking to, because of the piece constituting a 'dangerous invasion of privacy'? That's just really too cute.
We live in the age of the Facebook. We live in a place where dollar rules, and folks like Zuck and Jobs, and other actors of questionable ethics excel. No, Newsweek is not going to punish Leah, Newsweek has actually just recognized an employee who's able to expertly stir the pot, attract attention, and sell a lot more rags. She's getting a nice raise.
And how is this relevant, does this Satoshi has a facebook profile? Did the journalist send a fried request and article's Satoshi accepted? If none of this happened then I see no connections.
> We live in a place where dollar rules, and folks like Zuck > and Jobs, and other actors of questionable ethics excel.
Agreed. Mandela and Ghandi excelled too, in areas more important than business... Of course being rogue helps you excel in some areas, but it's not the only or main characteristic.
> No, Newsweek is not going to punish Leah, Newsweek has actually just recognized an employee who's able to expertly stir the pot, attract attention, and sell a lot more rags. She's getting a nice raise.
Given the fact that NW is a failed magazine, both financially and morally, I believe they probably give her a raise cut. But I don't think this is going to revamp their sales... Their articles, in all areas, are of very poor quality. If the magazine doesn't upgrade the content quality swiftly, it will face extinction soon enough.
Total agreement, Newsweek is so tenuously even a magazine at this point, but in the recent past I emailed the editors of a very large newspaper that did something similarly irresponsible to someone living in an arguably more dangerous place - and heard back nothing.
This quote tells you how sloppy the journalism is:
"Even so, Bitcoin is vulnerable to massive theft, fraud and scandal, which has seen the price of Bitcoins whipsaw from more than $1,200 each last year to as little as $130 in late February."
The MtGox price in February was meaningless, a more accurate representation would have been $1,200 to somewhere around $500 that reputable exchanges were selling for (I don't know the actual price, just enough to know that his figures are misleading).
The Mt Gox price divergence actually makes her point stronger. she's highlighting the volatility, and the failure of a major exchange is pretty volatile.
The ~$130 price was on BTC-e. It was very short-lived, and was caused by a very large dump of coins that were bought up by a bunch of bots, which met all the standing buy orders from ~$680 down to (if I remember right) $102.
The price immediately rebounded to the mid-$400's, once that order was consumed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Bitcoin can be untraceable. All you have to do is mix dirty money with clean money and split them. No way to tell which pieces are dirty, which ones are clean.
Most likely you don't even need to do that. Nothing would stop you from selling stolen money on LocalBitcoins. All outsiders will see is money moving from wallet A to wallet B and no way to find out who the owner is.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
Apple maintenance record: In 2007, MacBook Pro battery suffered an unusual number of failures, requiring repeated replacement.
preemptive quotations from user's own comment history in response to possible responses:
quoted 47 days ago: "The only legitimate use case to me seems not displaying possibly sensitive information"
quoted 144 days ago: "Naming and shaming? What the hell are you on about?"
"Sometimes I hate stupid engineers. They are such assholes sometimes that just do not get it at all.
This fucking thing is some stupid fun. Nothing more. I’m not sure what this cynicism burning with the power of a million suns shit is all about."
"Seems pretty reasonable to me that on a page like this every piece of content deserves its own history state. At least it’s a completely valid view, nothing to go apeshit over."
Note: quotes are deliberately out of context.
Note 2: The above information is sufficient to personally identify the user if someone is willing to spend the research effort.
Note 3: Personal opinions about the user's personality/character have been avoided.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
"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?
I am not a big fan of the way the article was written, but I can definitely see how some may decry it as being news worthy.
I think the author should be ashamed for posting a picture of this man's house. No need for that and it doesn't add to the story after the description.
I think I can see the thieves lining up to break in to his house to steal his bitcoins already.
Whether he is the Nakamoto behind Bitcoin or not, I think Newsweek have basically made him a target.
Let's put this another way. I see him as a potential target worth $400 million, and I'm not even inclined to partake in breaking and entering. So, what about the uncrupulous people who don't know much about bitcoin. Oh yeah, let's steal the guys computer. It is worth $400 million dollars.
Newsweek just lined this poor guy up as a target for every crook in LA.
Ironically, the officers didn't know it was _Satoshi_ _Nakamoto_ until she said so.
They're just helping the guy remove a trespasser, which is well within their line of duty. Oh, and the homeowner who called them is named "Satoshi Nakamoto." What do you want to bet they don't really know/care who that is?
Especially if he is cleared for classified work, he will know exactly who to call to get some law enforcement backup. Seriously, don't try to break into a guy's house who is employed by the U.S. Government and has access to that kind of stuff. (I know she didn't break in, but she's definitely invading.)
Sadly, government contract work doesn't usually include your own personal drone army. our the authority to mobilize national law enforcement assets. they're just jobs.
Um... I don't know about the U.S., but I've done some work involving classified information in Sweden, and it's not like you get access to a special hotline or anything. If you are in immediate danger you still call the regular emergency number like everyone else.
Besides, not everyone works with Top Secret information, that's the entire purpose of having different classifications. Even Restricted information is still classified.
Can this be real? a guy calls the cops, but admits he was involved?
"Tacitly acknowledging his role in the Bitcoin project, he looks down, staring at the pavement and categorically refuses to answer questions."
"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."
It sounds like he's 'on the spectrum' - very strong commitment to the literal truth goes with the territory. As does desire for privacy, tendency to work alone obsessively on unusual projects, lack of interest in money (or in being rich, rather)...
That's an interesting observation and now that you pointed it out, I think I agree with you. However, I think that more than autistic people lack interest in "being rich". If I had $400m, I'd buy a house and pay off our car. The remaining $399.5m would be invested. I'd take out $40-50k per year for spending. Extravagant lifestyles are overrated, I think.
Speaking as a sometimes paranoid libertarian with a reasonable amount of Bitcoin, myself, I can say the two things preventing me from cashing out of any portion of it is the likelihood I would be identified and the fact that any sales of it I have to pay taxes on. I purchased a house this year that I could have afforded several times over in Bitcoin, but instead took out a loan just like anyone else.
I don't understand this. the amount you'd pay in capital gains is probably less than what you're going to pay out in interest, notwithstanding the mortgage interest deduction to your taxes (in which the government subsidizes you at the expense of other taxpayers).
I mean, perhaps you ran the numbers and it works out better financially, but I get the impression from your post that you don't want to pay any taxes on it on principle, which seems economically irrational.
> [...] the two things preventing me from cashing out of any portion of it is the likelihood I would be identified and the fact that any sales of it I have to pay taxes on.
Do you think this will change?
If not, then your unspent bitcoins are worth exactly $0 (ie. if you don't spend them they might as well be worth nothing). Or are you waiting for something?
Granted, I don't know who you are, and how important it is for you not to be identified (by whom?).
It had better be real, because the entire story hangs around the unprovable observation of that vague admission. Otherwise this is a story about harassing a shut-in and his family.
So Newsweek outed a guy who allegedly owns half a billion dollars in pseudo-untraceable, digital cash? I hope they're also going to chip in for a permanent security detail...
More seriously, I think they could have done a better job reporting on the identity without giving so much away:
* A picture of his house is posted, identical to the one in Google Street View
* The license plate is relatively clear in the high-resolution image
* His exact address has more or less already been discovered using only the information in the article
* Full names of family members were used
It's a legitimate story -- understanding Nakomoto's motivations for creating Bitcoin as discovered from his past is a worthwhile topic. (For example, would your feelings about cryptocurrency change if it turned out Nakomoto was a high-level NSA operative?) But, again, it could have been reported in a way that didn't compromise his identity so thoroughly.
Using any of his Bitcoin would attract far more attention than any dubiously sourced article though, and could risk proving both that he is Satoshi and still has access to an enormous amount of money. (For all we know right now he could have lost/destroyed all of his private keys).
It's a joke, really. It's like she didn't even think about what she was doing... I encourage people to send her an email voicing whatever opinion you have, it's readily available (I don't know if it's against HN rules, so I won't post it myself just yet).
Well, I can't see how its against HN rules to post it. Her email is lmcgrathgoodman (at) gmail (dot) com. Thats the email she posts on the contact section of her own website (http://leahmcgrathgoodman.com/).
To be clear, I am not encouraging anyone send her abusive emails, or anything that might be illegal. I am simply posting her contact details in the context of people wanting to tell her what they felt about this article. She is an investigative journalist who is no stranger to courting trouble. She managed to get herself thrown out of the UK apparently for asking too many questions.
I very much doubt that will do anything though. If you really felt that this article needed to be pulled/modified, you're probably better off contacting someone from Newsweek. http://mediakit.newsweekdailybeast.com/contact.html
But this seems to be their lead story. And they are getting all this extra publicity and page views because of it. So unless Satoshi or his family brings a court case I don't see why they would.
A determined attacker (the kind that needs worrying about) would find Satoshi even if Newsweek hadn't posted a photo of the house or license plate in their article.
Right, but this lowers the bar to any random yahoo who's capable of a Google search, rather than just "determined attackers". That's part of the issue.
Given that San Bernardino county and its neighbor, Riverside county, have a reputation as a "meth capitol" of California, my guess is that a substantially higher number than average of people within easy driving distance of this man might fit into that category. Perhaps not "dumb", but "desperate" enough.
I don't know if that's your case, but I can't help finding it hilarious to see so many anarcho-capitalists here criticizing Newsweek for following their own interest...
Why wouldn't anarcho-capitalists be entitled to criticize someone who follows their own interest? Are anarcho-capitalists not entitled to criticize thieves either?
Because they always say that following your own interest is the best way to assure the greater good. AFAIK thieves are excluded because they don't respect private property.
Still though, if you're even somewhat worried about protecting your anonymity, why would you use your full name?
It might seem that being one "Alice Smith" amongst thousands is pretty good anonymity, but cross-reference that against people with the expertise and ability required to implement something like Bitcoin, and I bet that list gets really short really fast.
For the record, I do still think it was sleazy and unnecessary to publish his car's license plate and a photo of his house, (even though they would have been easy enough for people to figure out based on the other personal information unearthed in the article).
As much as I don't like this - at the very least - ridiculously unethical article, I'm pretty sure a lot of papers would be dying to publish this piece.
It's just my personal opinion. If someone is clearly trying to remain undisturbed, I find it very disrespectful to distribute pictures of their face and home without their consent.
I see it as good investigative journalism. You don't think the single person that potentially originated a new form of global currency that's dominating headlines, and receiving the attention of world leaders is newsworthy? I'm a firm believer in privacy - but when something one has put into the world stands to have a massively disruptive force, it's worth exploring who that person is, and what their motivations are.
His identity was revealed the moment he put his actual full name to the paper though :/ I would has sympathy if he actually did use a pseudonym, but assuming this is true then what did he really expect would happen?
I agree that it's harder to have sympathy for him as a result. However, nobody deserves to have their rights violated* because they made a simple mistake. If you forget to lock your house or car, you don't deserve to have it broken into. If you drop your wallet for a moment, you don't deserve to have it stolen.
*If you don't believe in a right to privacy, substitute "be harassed by strangers" or "have their and their family's safety compromised". Even outside a framework of rights, some things remain inappropriate and wrong.
Investigative journalism has its place whenever there is information to be revealed. This story is the skeleton of that. All the investigations were done very smartly, but they didn't reveal anything relevant. I'd say the journalist doxed him out of spite.
>Investigative journalism has its place whenever there is information to be revealed. This story is the skeleton of that. All the investigations were done very smartly, but they didn't reveal anything relevant.
Disagree. The mere fact that Satoshi Nakamoto is, in fact, Satoshi Nakamoto is relevant in itself. We had no idea who this guy was, and I've seen countless articles on HN speculating about it. At least having an idea of who we're talking about ends all the speculation and attribution to people that are not Satoshi, which has been happening for years.
Bitcoin is one of the hottest news stories right now. People want to know more about Bitcoin. A big question about Bitcoin is "who created Bitcoin?" Newsweek answered that question.
This is journalism 101.
Many of you disagree with this premise –– and I sympathize and understand why you're upset –– but this is how the system operates.
Right, but the journalist could have found him and written an article about his background and motivation without putting a picture of his license plates, home, face, and location in a prominent article, all of this after harassing him to the point that he felt it necessary to call the police. That's just dumb.
This brings up an interesting question, too - does writing a prominent piece of software qualify you as a "public figure" and allow the paparazzi to chase you everywhere and stalk your acquaintances and family?
How far would you take this? If such a person hid their identity better than Nakamoto and refused all contact (even contact initiated under a false pretense, as in the article), would it be justified to break into their house to learn about them? To follow them to and from work? I'm not trying to be provocative, simply illustrating that the needs of the many (voyeuristic curiosity) do not necessarily outweigh the needs of the few (personal privacy and safety).
"What?" The police officer balks. "This is the guy who created Bitcoin? It looks like he's living a pretty humble life."
That quote smells totally fake to me. There's just no way some random office would know what Bitcoin is, and even if he did, that's not something a police officer would say. I don't know what that says about the rest of the article, but that quote doesn't read very factual to me.
Bitcoin is all over mainstream media. Its ups and downs are covered in the finance section of even the most old school and conservative of newspapers. Hell my father-in-law knows what bitcoin is, and he is about as far behind on the technology curve as you can get.
This. My mother can barely use her computer and yet she knows what bitcoin is too. My parents even brought it up in conversation the last time they visited.
Why couldn't a random officer know what Bitcoin is? My father heard of it and knows nothing about technology. It's no longer a secretive online currency, it's everywhere.
If you read the article, it suggests that the police officer is told that the person is Satoshi Nakamoto and the officer exclaims:
"What?" The police officer balks. "This is the guy who created Bitcoin?"
I can accept that the man on the street would have heard about bitcoin, but to know the name of the person who did the original work on the currency? That just seems a bit unlikely.
Obviously the conversation has been heavily edited. Nobody really speaks so clearly and succinctly.
To me, it looks probable that she really said something like "I would like to ask him about Bitcoin. This man is Satoshi Nakamoto. I think he's the man who created Bitcoin"
So she prepped the police officer to deliver the quote that she wanted "This is the guy who created Bitcoin?", by planting the suggestion first.
It's not a stretch to imagine the conversation went something along the lines of ""I would like to ask him about Bitcoin. This man is Satoshi Nakamoto, he created Bitcoin." and a little bit of creative license was taken with the reporting.
It still colours the article, but perhaps not so strongly.
The quote does sound odd, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were an embellishment or paraphrase.
But you know, the New York Times has been running stories on Bitcoin for a couple of years now. It's been all over CNN and other mainstream news sources. The New Yorker printed a feature about Satoshi Nakamoto back in 2011 [1]. Popular TV shows like The Daily Show have talked about Bitcoin [2]. Newspapers are printing political cartoons about it [3]. The Washington Post has three Bitcoin headlines on the front page of its web site this morning! (One about MtGOX, one on Nakamoto, and one on Autumn Radtke.)
Anyone who has read, watched, or listened to news in the past year has a good chance of knowing some stuff about Bitcoin, just like they know that Steve Jobs died and what Google Glass is. The name Satoshi Nakamoto is reasonably memorable and distinctive. And law enforcement officers in particular might have some professional curiosity about the Bitcoin economy.
Supposing there is some truth to the quote, I have to assume she skipped over the part where she told the police officer "He is the guy who created Bitcoin."
No culture deserves to have its creation myths exposed or destroyed. Ironically, Newsweek's behavior makes a strong case for anonymous communication and payment systems.
So Newsweek hires paparazzo's now? The need to disclose everything about the guy and call several family members etc is really wrong. Which I could undo my click...., no need to invade his privacy so much, "fun to know because interesting" is not a good enough reason to write the article...
Call his family, that is what reporters do to confirm a story. The man created a currency that is used world wide, is talked about every day on HN. Can you imagine if facebook was created and we didn't know who did it?
There's one thing that doesn't add up: why would such a privacy conscious man use his real name on a project he thought might be illegal? If he was so serious about his privacy, he would not have used his real name in public.
Usually the simplest explanations are the right ones. Who expects to create a new form of exchange, that goes on to become a $10 billion network (and maybe one day far larger)?
It's entirely plausible that Satoshi thought using that name, on his little project, would be enough. There is sometimes a lab mentality among people whose work has mostly been hidden away, they would never expect it to touch every corner of the world economy. It was just an experiment early on, and by the time it was obvious it would be more than that, his name was already attached.
That's easy - bitcoin isn't and never was about "privacy". It was about defeating that supposedly-horrible "fiat money" and the associated inflation. It's always been more about escaping government-backed money. From the very beginning, when selling the idea of bitcoin, the true believers praised the lack of regulation and how your money wouldn't lose its value over time. Privacy was secondary, if mentioned at all.
I suspect the Silk Road connection is what popularized the idea of a public ledger somehow providing privacy.
Being a private person doesn't necessarily mean that you go to great lengths to conceal yourself. It just means you don't offer more for free, like posting your personal life all over Facebook for example.
Now that the article outed him, maybe he will spend some of his Bitcoin on a fortress, security and drones (coded himself of course) to patrol his house.
I'm torn about the article. On one hand this seems like a horrid breach of privacy and a terribly dangerous thing to do. On the other, even if they just said he lives in his family home in California, people were going to find out all this information.
Half of me thinks it's better everyone knows they were doxed all at once.
I thought that bitcoin as a whole would be badly shaken at the second Satoshi touched his coins. What if, now that he allegedly has a face, he could have allegedly legitimate needs to spend his coins on?
> "He was the kind of person who, if you made an honest mistake, he might call you an idiot and never speak to you again," Andresen says. "Back then, it was not clear that creating Bitcoin might be a legal thing to do. He went to great lengths to protect his anonymity."
Except that he used his full, real name. That is what seems so odd to me.
If it really is him though, I'm very much afraid this article just destroyed his life...
702 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 337 ms ] threadBut it's also possible to believe that certain government powers should be very limited while at the same time believing that individuals should strive not to be assholes to each other.
Information wants a banana.
This is a private board, we are guests here. Even boards dedicated to discussing free speech regularly regulate the speech on their board because they need to keep peace. It's a big Internet, and you can make your own space.
Second:
I don't know how the people who run HN have ever claimed to be special free-speech proponents. They probably think, like most Americans can be shamed into thinking, that the government shouldn't punish you for speech, but aside from that I'm not aware of them, say, calling out other message boards for regulating their content as "censorship."
Third:
Unfortunately, once a general-purpose journalism piece lists your information, that's usually where claims of "doxxing" end.
One thing that annoys me about HN though is that I read it primarily through Feedly, and content often gets pushed to HN's feed prior to deletion, so I end up with a lot of annoying dead links to HN in Feedly.
Newsweek have already made it public, no point trying to protect his identity now
[1] Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
It seems like we don't know what we want.
I feel very silly.
[To be clear, I had also assumed that a Japanese crypto person who wanted privacy would have used a western pseudonym.]
But yeah, it almost seems like the crypto community didn't really want to dox Nakamoto, even if many of them could have.
https://twitter.com/SquawkCNBC/status/441544016421978112
If he was put off by just one journalist visit, I imagine he'll consider relocating now.
Having interacted enough with bad members of the media [NB: there are also good ones], I'm not so naive as to think that there's no way they could have persuaded him to do it with lies or bullshit or empty threats, but without evidence for that he could have just said "I don't want to talk to you" and left it at that.
EDIT: I've re-read and might be changing my position. He didn't actually consent to any in-person interview. It was very very clear he didn't want to talk in person. So where did the picture come from?
Is there a print-version of this article? That would show the photo credit in the margin. Too bad photo credits don't seem to be the custom on the web.
"Satoshi Nakamoto in Lancaster, Calif. Credit: Photo via Photobucket.com via Satoshi Nakamoto (Wagumabher)"
Sounds more like she uncovered his personal photobucket and took an image.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zpmo8/the_face_beh...
If you think this article is a dangerous invasion of privacy, tell her and her employers (Newsweek).
Beside that the article has very little content other than "he's a little bit weird" an observation that is not exactly original, it's almost a stereotype that really smart people are often a "little bit weird" .
edit: now you've edited for clarity, it's clear we're saying the same thing.
They just put a 400 million dollar bounty on this guy and his entire family for no apparent reason.
"Doxing" is just an Internet term for extremely offensive behavior, but it's not illegal.
Brother: "My brother is an asshole. What you don't know about him is that he's worked on classified stuff. His life was a complete blank for a while. You're not going to be able to get to him. He'll deny everything. He'll never admit to starting Bitcoin."
Daughter: "He would keep his office locked and we would get into trouble if we touched his computer," she recalls. "He was always expounding on politics and current events. He loved new and old technology. He built his own computers and was very proud of them."
etc etc etc.
They could have written exactly the same story, but without giving away exactly where he and his family lives, and it wouldn't have suffered in any way.
I might argue that it's often difficult to publish someone's home address without publishing his family's address too.
They also explicitly state he's got keys worth ~$400 million.
Seems like painting a target on him.
Being good at science doesn't count.
In the article she says she only saw him once with the cops, and then had a very very short discussion with her when cops were present.
If the photo implies (as it did to me and apparently you) that he consented to an interview he didn't actually consent to, that's misleading journalism.
http://leahmcgrathgoodman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Jer...
Which may or may not be out of date
http://leahmcgrathgoodman.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/vis...
Which has other useful info on it.
I don't think it's petty at all to link to publicly available information, when others have requested that information. Google-fu differs between individuals.
I do find it particularly petty that someone would go to great lengths to expose the private details of the life of a man who just wants to be left in peace.
All I have done is link to some items that she released into the public domain on a previous occasion.
Sharing the stupidity of others is a long-lived internet tradition. It's almost adage status; be careful what you post, it may come back to haunt you later. The same is true of this, I suppose.
I, for one, am quite interested to know more about Satoshi Nakamoto and this article is responsive to my curiosity about him. As someone else has pointed out, a great deal of information is public anyway in the form of property tax records and what not. If this were not the case I would get much less direct mail.
How adorable! You think Newsweek is going to give Leah a talking to, because of the piece constituting a 'dangerous invasion of privacy'? That's just really too cute.
We live in the age of the Facebook. We live in a place where dollar rules, and folks like Zuck and Jobs, and other actors of questionable ethics excel. No, Newsweek is not going to punish Leah, Newsweek has actually just recognized an employee who's able to expertly stir the pot, attract attention, and sell a lot more rags. She's getting a nice raise.
And how is this relevant, does this Satoshi has a facebook profile? Did the journalist send a fried request and article's Satoshi accepted? If none of this happened then I see no connections.
> We live in a place where dollar rules, and folks like Zuck > and Jobs, and other actors of questionable ethics excel.
Agreed. Mandela and Ghandi excelled too, in areas more important than business... Of course being rogue helps you excel in some areas, but it's not the only or main characteristic.
> No, Newsweek is not going to punish Leah, Newsweek has actually just recognized an employee who's able to expertly stir the pot, attract attention, and sell a lot more rags. She's getting a nice raise.
Given the fact that NW is a failed magazine, both financially and morally, I believe they probably give her a raise cut. But I don't think this is going to revamp their sales... Their articles, in all areas, are of very poor quality. If the magazine doesn't upgrade the content quality swiftly, it will face extinction soon enough.
But oh wait, this is hacker news.
stupid paywall.
why on earth all this work, just to chose a real name? this does not make any sense. as if SN could not haven chosen a name to deflect his identity.
The price immediately rebounded to the mid-$400's, once that order was consumed.
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
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.
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.
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.
(Modified repost from dead original thread)
With bitcoin, sure you can trace coins, but laundering services (namely things like exchanges) can make you disappear a bit quicker.
Overall, though, bitcoin is the IRS' dream.
(Repost from dead original thread)
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.
(Source: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=ru&js=n&prev=...)
Most likely you don't even need to do that. Nothing would stop you from selling stolen money on LocalBitcoins. All outsiders will see is money moving from wallet A to wallet B and no way to find out who the owner is.
http://darkcoin.io/
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
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.
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.)
Also, quit being so paranoid.
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.
http://www.therichest.com/luxury/most-expensive/10-most-expe...
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Parker
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/latinamerica/l...
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.
• Full names and home towns of your children and your wife
• Picture of your house – include a clear photo of your car's license plate
• Your home town, so anyone can locate you on Google Maps
• Your work history
• Your net worth
• Your health history
• Any notable personality traits you have, so the whole world can comment on them
Seriously, put up or shut up.
Because he's famous, you're more likely to pick on him.
A journalist has the ability to take that to a whole new level by really shining a spotlight on it.
Just because it's easy doesn't make it right.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They conceive of a narrative and find totems that can support their position.
You are espousing ideals that are taught in school, but rarely achieved in the real world.
That whole theme of unethical in B happens most of the time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_figure
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.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_figure
Neither did Nakamoto, if you read the article.
Extracted from user's own comment history:
Nationality: German, Caucasian
Location: In proximity to Bonn; possibly residing in an apartment within a zone with a higher than average ethnic population.
Occupation: Computer related
Educational background: possibly engineering / physical sciences
Siblings: At least one sister
Operating system: OSX or higher
Screen resolution: 1440x900, 15.4 inch screen
Primary and secondary education: possibly in Bavaria; victim of bullying.
Political affiliations: self-identified socialist
Police record: 1 traffic stop, no citation; 1 5 euro fine for jaywalking.
Age: 25 or older
Possible attendee of: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2013/Fahrplan/schedule.html
Possible mis-identification: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2013/Fahrplan/speakers/4144.ht... (video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBQ8xRM3jQk)
Living room audio: Airplay speaker
Mobile phone: iPhone 5s
Screenshot of user's google search results: http://imgur.com/a/Yco1R#0
Possible user of: Inkpad, iTunes
Apple maintenance record: In 2007, MacBook Pro battery suffered an unusual number of failures, requiring repeated replacement.
preemptive quotations from user's own comment history in response to possible responses:
quoted 47 days ago: "The only legitimate use case to me seems not displaying possibly sensitive information"
quoted 144 days ago: "Naming and shaming? What the hell are you on about?"
"Sometimes I hate stupid engineers. They are such assholes sometimes that just do not get it at all. This fucking thing is some stupid fun. Nothing more. I’m not sure what this cynicism burning with the power of a million suns shit is all about."
"Seems pretty reasonable to me that on a page like this every piece of content deserves its own history state. At least it’s a completely valid view, nothing to go apeshit over."
Note: quotes are deliberately out of context.
Note 2: The above information is sufficient to personally identify the user if someone is willing to spend the research effort.
Note 3: Personal opinions about the user's personality/character have been avoided.
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.)
You can keep it up if you want to.
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.
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.
But it is in Newsweek's interest to find the creator of Bitcoin, if they can get the scoop.
It's the free market plus the Bill of Rights (specifically the First Amendment) in action. A perfectly libertarian thing just happened here, IMHO.
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.
Now it's too late. Read below.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/6/5479050/press-chases-allege...
Are you saying such a thing would not have happened in a libertarian society? Do you seriously believe that?
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?).
It doesn't matter how you turn it around. Journalists always have a choice and they constantly keep stuff out of the public.
What matters is not whether they are legally allowed to do these things but whether they should had.
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.
He now likely has ground to sue Newsweek, sadly I'm afraid their pockets ain't too deep these days...
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.
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.
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.
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.
List of the known ones, think about how many are unreported...
For example: http://gizmodo.com/5517656/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-has-17m-wor...
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.
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.
I guess he'll have to adjust to living like a millionaire/celebrity.
The owner of the company I work for has thirty times the money Satoshi allegedly has, and yes, he has a bodyguard at most times.
That said, I wish they'd protected his privacy more. It seems he didn't want to be outed.
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.
But, thanks.
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...
[1] http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/#tab:overall
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?
I think the author should be ashamed for posting a picture of this man's house. No need for that and it doesn't add to the story after the description.
Whether he is the Nakamoto behind Bitcoin or not, I think Newsweek have basically made him a target.
Let's put this another way. I see him as a potential target worth $400 million, and I'm not even inclined to partake in breaking and entering. So, what about the uncrupulous people who don't know much about bitcoin. Oh yeah, let's steal the guys computer. It is worth $400 million dollars.
Newsweek just lined this poor guy up as a target for every crook in LA.
I feel really sorry for the guy.
People don't have to be working in the tech scene to be interested.
They're just helping the guy remove a trespasser, which is well within their line of duty. Oh, and the homeowner who called them is named "Satoshi Nakamoto." What do you want to bet they don't really know/care who that is?
Especially if he is cleared for classified work, he will know exactly who to call to get some law enforcement backup. Seriously, don't try to break into a guy's house who is employed by the U.S. Government and has access to that kind of stuff. (I know she didn't break in, but she's definitely invading.)
Besides, not everyone works with Top Secret information, that's the entire purpose of having different classifications. Even Restricted information is still classified.
I'm sure he has Fox Mulder's number.
"Tacitly acknowledging his role in the Bitcoin project, he looks down, staring at the pavement and categorically refuses to answer questions."
"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."
I mean, perhaps you ran the numbers and it works out better financially, but I get the impression from your post that you don't want to pay any taxes on it on principle, which seems economically irrational.
Do you think this will change?
If not, then your unspent bitcoins are worth exactly $0 (ie. if you don't spend them they might as well be worth nothing). Or are you waiting for something?
Granted, I don't know who you are, and how important it is for you not to be identified (by whom?).
More seriously, I think they could have done a better job reporting on the identity without giving so much away:
* A picture of his house is posted, identical to the one in Google Street View
* The license plate is relatively clear in the high-resolution image
* His exact address has more or less already been discovered using only the information in the article
* Full names of family members were used
It's a legitimate story -- understanding Nakomoto's motivations for creating Bitcoin as discovered from his past is a worthwhile topic. (For example, would your feelings about cryptocurrency change if it turned out Nakomoto was a high-level NSA operative?) But, again, it could have been reported in a way that didn't compromise his identity so thoroughly.
That doesn't make it right and his wealth doesn't make him free game but it does mean that he's not completely been hung out to dry.
If he is the real Satoshi he may have lost or discarded his private keys.
Some snarky comment about how this is why bloggers aren't journalists because a "real" news organization has ethics or something.
Honestly, I always thought it was the other way around. This situation only confirms that.
There's no proof here he has "money".
To be clear, I am not encouraging anyone send her abusive emails, or anything that might be illegal. I am simply posting her contact details in the context of people wanting to tell her what they felt about this article. She is an investigative journalist who is no stranger to courting trouble. She managed to get herself thrown out of the UK apparently for asking too many questions.
I very much doubt that will do anything though. If you really felt that this article needed to be pulled/modified, you're probably better off contacting someone from Newsweek. http://mediakit.newsweekdailybeast.com/contact.html
But this seems to be their lead story. And they are getting all this extra publicity and page views because of it. So unless Satoshi or his family brings a court case I don't see why they would.
Seriously, the story is best of psyops.
* your name is Alice Smith
and knowing:
* your name is Alice Smith
* your age
* your car's license plate
* the street address of where you live and work
* the names and identities of your close family members
* the fact that you are worth ~$400M
It might seem that being one "Alice Smith" amongst thousands is pretty good anonymity, but cross-reference that against people with the expertise and ability required to implement something like Bitcoin, and I bet that list gets really short really fast.
For the record, I do still think it was sleazy and unnecessary to publish his car's license plate and a photo of his house, (even though they would have been easy enough for people to figure out based on the other personal information unearthed in the article).
*If you don't believe in a right to privacy, substitute "be harassed by strangers" or "have their and their family's safety compromised". Even outside a framework of rights, some things remain inappropriate and wrong.
Disagree. The mere fact that Satoshi Nakamoto is, in fact, Satoshi Nakamoto is relevant in itself. We had no idea who this guy was, and I've seen countless articles on HN speculating about it. At least having an idea of who we're talking about ends all the speculation and attribution to people that are not Satoshi, which has been happening for years.
Bitcoin is one of the hottest news stories right now. People want to know more about Bitcoin. A big question about Bitcoin is "who created Bitcoin?" Newsweek answered that question.
This is journalism 101.
Many of you disagree with this premise –– and I sympathize and understand why you're upset –– but this is how the system operates.
This brings up an interesting question, too - does writing a prominent piece of software qualify you as a "public figure" and allow the paparazzi to chase you everywhere and stalk your acquaintances and family?
That quote smells totally fake to me. There's just no way some random office would know what Bitcoin is, and even if he did, that's not something a police officer would say. I don't know what that says about the rest of the article, but that quote doesn't read very factual to me.
"What?" The police officer balks. "This is the guy who created Bitcoin?"
I can accept that the man on the street would have heard about bitcoin, but to know the name of the person who did the original work on the currency? That just seems a bit unlikely.
To me, it looks probable that she really said something like "I would like to ask him about Bitcoin. This man is Satoshi Nakamoto. I think he's the man who created Bitcoin"
So she prepped the police officer to deliver the quote that she wanted "This is the guy who created Bitcoin?", by planting the suggestion first.
It still colours the article, but perhaps not so strongly.
But you know, the New York Times has been running stories on Bitcoin for a couple of years now. It's been all over CNN and other mainstream news sources. The New Yorker printed a feature about Satoshi Nakamoto back in 2011 [1]. Popular TV shows like The Daily Show have talked about Bitcoin [2]. Newspapers are printing political cartoons about it [3]. The Washington Post has three Bitcoin headlines on the front page of its web site this morning! (One about MtGOX, one on Nakamoto, and one on Autumn Radtke.)
Anyone who has read, watched, or listened to news in the past year has a good chance of knowing some stuff about Bitcoin, just like they know that Steve Jobs died and what Google Glass is. The name Satoshi Nakamoto is reasonably memorable and distinctive. And law enforcement officers in particular might have some professional curiosity about the Bitcoin economy.
[1]: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/10/111010fa_fact_...
[2]: http://www.thewire.com/entertainment/2014/02/daily-show-help...
[3]: http://buttcoin.org/bitcoin-hardy-har-har
"no way"... You lost me and your credibility with that one.
You don't have to have something to hide to want privacy.
It's entirely plausible that Satoshi thought using that name, on his little project, would be enough. There is sometimes a lab mentality among people whose work has mostly been hidden away, they would never expect it to touch every corner of the world economy. It was just an experiment early on, and by the time it was obvious it would be more than that, his name was already attached.
I suspect the Silk Road connection is what popularized the idea of a public ledger somehow providing privacy.
Oh, and the fact he has thousands of bitcoins.
Half of me thinks it's better everyone knows they were doxed all at once.
How is the argument "X was going to happen anyway so it's fine if it happens now" ever right?
However if it's safety, it's better to know up front than to think you're anonymous.
* takes off tinfoil hat
Except that he used his full, real name. That is what seems so odd to me.
If it really is him though, I'm very much afraid this article just destroyed his life...