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The Outing of Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Is Brilliant Journalism
In Newsweek, finance editor Leah McGrath Goodman
claims to have outed
the mysterious creator of the digital currency Bitcoin. The Japanese-American man lives in California and incredibly, is actually named Satoshi Nakamoto. Though the man, who now goes by Dorian S. Nakamoto, would be a multi-millionaire given Bitcoin’s current value of $645.50 and his estimated possession of 1.5 million of the coins, Goodman reports that he lives a humble life in Los Angeles’s San Bernardino foothills. She’s likely right in her speculation that he hasn’t cashed in because doing so would have outed him, as he would have had to reveal his identity in some way to the Bitcoin to USD intermediary he used. Many in the Bitcoin community have reacted with
disbelief and outrage at the “doxxing” of the reclusive creator arguing that the exposure is a massive invasion of privacy. But if true, the article is just an act of great investigative reporting.
Nakamoto himself didn’t want to discuss Bitcoin with Goodman, calling police when she came to his home, but he did seem to admit to being the creator by not denying it and making statements like this: “I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it. It’s been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection.”
Those in the Bitcoin community were upset that Goodman included Dorian’s real name, a photo of him, and a photo of his home. Their argument is multifold: that his request to remain pseudo-anonymous should be respected, that his safety is imperiled by outing him as a multimillionaire, and that the level of detail in the story is unnecessary. “You really should take off the picture of his house… what are you, insane?” writes one commenter on the story. “Its sort of a shame that this article went out of their way to prove the identity of a man who clearly didn’t want to be revealed,” writes another. “Article writer comes off as a Ruthless type.”
On the wealth exposure, TechDirt’s Mike Masnick
asks, “Question: for those freaking out about Newsweek ‘revealing’ Nakamoto, are you similarly incensed when paper reports on big lottery winners?”
The Forbes E-book On Bitcoin
Secret Money: Living on Bitcoin in the Real World, by Forbes staff writer Kashmir Hill, can be bought in Bitcoin or legal tender.
“I’m disappointed Newsweek decided to dox the Nakamoto family, and regret talking to Leah,” tweeted Gavin Andresen, a Bitcoin developer who took the reins of the project after Nakamoto pulled out in 2011. Goodman reports that Satoshi’s absence from the Bitcoin project in the last few years coincides with 64-year-old Dorian’s health issues since that time, including prostrate cancer and a stroke.
The journalist herself is taking questions
on Twitter and says she needed to include the details she did to “offer a sense of his humanity.” Leah McGrath Goodman argues that including a photo of his car and residence was not an invasion of privacy because those things “are already public.” This of course is a cue for a discussion about the difference between privacy and obscurity, but yes, she’s right, once he was outed, it provided the pieces needed to track down where he lived. It wasn’t a necessity to include a photo of his home and car in the story beyond proving the humility of his lifestyle, but it also wasn’t very private. I was able to get his address and pull up a photo of his home on
Google
Street View in less than 10 minutes; and yes, the Google Street View photo of his home includes his car. As for details Goodman did not include, she says that ”did not publish his current email, which is private;” she obtained it “through a company he buys model trains from.”
Google Street View has an even better photo of Nakamoto’s home. Once his identity was clearly established, this was no longer private information.
“This was a dick move to Satoshi who didn’t desire this in any way,” says security expert Mikko Hypponen. “It’s a big scoop, but a shitty thing to publish all this information.”
Other journalists have tried to out Satoshi Nakamoto in recent years, most famously Joshua Davis in the New Yorker, but have been unsuccessful. Their reports consisted of vague finger pointing and speculation. Goodman’s report is a thorough and convincing one. She did public record digging to find him. According to Forbes researcher Sue Radlauer, Dorian Nakamoto is one of three Satoshi Nakamotos living in the U.S.; another one passed away in Hawaii in 2008 and two others live in Japan. As Mathew Ingram
notes, “It’s interesting how everyone chose to believe the secretive hacker mastermind pseudonym thing [when it came to Bitcoin creator's identity]. The truth is boring.”
It may be boring but it’s impressive that Goodman apparently succeeded where others have failed. While Dorian S. Nakamoto refused to talk at length with her, she did interview many people in his life, including his brothers, children, ex-wife, and former colleagues, all of whom found the idea that he is Bitcoin’s creator compelling given his libertarian views, background as a computer engineer and work on classified military projects. They also claim his writing style matches that of Nakamoto.
Is it fair to say that it’s an invasion of privacy to prove that a man who identified himself as Satoshi Nakamoto when he created Bitcoin is in fact a man named Satoshi Nakamoto? He created something that has become a global phenomenon, caused governments to wring their hands, and taken on immense real-world value, with a billions-dollar market cap. The need to know the creator, who himself holds much of the currency, was important. This is not tabloid journalism; this is very much in the public interest, and important for those adopting and investing in the Bitcoin system to know.
Mike Hearn, a Google engineer who became a Bitcoin developer in recent years was more sanguine about the outing. “I don’t know if it changes things that much,” says Hearn by email. “I guess he won’t rejoin development or anything. I’m not even sure if he still watches. I’d like to think he does and he is satisfied with how things have turned out.”
Nakamoto may have wanted to distance himself from the project by using his middle name in its authorship but there was some pride and desire to be associated with it in not taking on a true pseudonym. It must have gotten bigger than he ever expected, and with the arrest and prosecutions of other currency creators, he may have feared the financial Frankenstein cooked up in his computer laboratory. Now that his thin veil of anonymity has been stripped away, will he be free to cash in? In that way, she may have done him a favor.
It’s a journalist’s job to invade privacy, and to report things that people often don’t want reported, to tell stories people don’t want told. Respectable journalists try to do this in a way that doesn’t cause unnecessary harm, or unwarranted intrusion into people’s personal lives. The Bitcoin story is too big and too important not to be fully investigated and told. When Nakamoto sent his project out into the world in 2008, under his real name no less, it was inevitable that he would one day be unmasked.
It’s certainly ironic. Just as Bitcoin is less anonymous than people think — it’s a huge traceable public ledger after all — so is its creator.
*With reporting contributed by Andy Greenberg
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