Updated @ 8pm ET: Nakamoto, in an exclusive interview with Associated Press, has denied that he’s the founder of Bitcoin. In fact, he says he hadn’t even heard of Bitcoin until a reporter contacted his son three weeks ago. The plot thickens…
In a major coup for news organizations and intrepid reporting, Newsweek reporter Leah McGrath Goodman claims to have successfully uncovered the identity of Bitcoin’s enigmatic founder, Satoshi Nakamoto. In doing so, she shattered the intrepid mythology surrounding the mysterious creator that pegged him as a Tokyo whiz kid, a crypto-anarchist, or a number of particular individuals — mathematicians, file-sharing application authors, economic sociologists, and security researchers were all fingered as potential BTC creators. All denied it.
According to McGrath, they were all wrong. Satoshi Nakamoto is a 64-year-old man with a love of model trains, a mysterious career (he’s known to have worked for multiple classified organizations), and a home in California. His real name — which was widely thought to be a pseudonym — is indeed Satoshi Nakamoto.
Nakamoto developed Bitcoin in 2008 and 2009, working with a small group of open source advocates who believed, as he did, that a new currency model that didn’t rely on banks as a middle man was a valuable and important goal. By 2011, he’d drawn down his participation in the project and dropped off the map after Gavin Andresen (Bitcoin’s chief scientist and one of the early developers) told him he’d accepted an invitation to speak to the CIA about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
The Nakamoto living in California is known for being obsessively private and hasn’t used his birth name in daily life for decades, choosing instead to go by Dorian S. Nakamoto, which doubtlessly made it harder to track him. He worked for Hughes Aircraft (now part of Raytheon), the Radio Corporation of America, and did independent consulting for the military. After the September 11 attacks, he did classified work for the Federal Aviation Administration, though the details of that project aren’t known.
Bitcoin chief scientist, Gavin Andresen.
Lining up the facts
Code analysis had previously implied that Satoshi was an older person. His coding style was apparently a bit outdated, and idiosyncratic, reflecting personal decisions rather than the streamlined efforts of a clean-up crew. Gavin Andresen states that while the resulting programs were “incredibly tight and well-written at the lower level,” function combinations were messy and difficult to parse. Some of the citations in his original Bitcoin paper stretch back to 1957, implying that he was active at the time.
The writing style of the confirmed human Satoshi matches the style of the now-famous Bitcoin developer Satoshi (or at least, it does according to Newsweek). Furthermore, the time Satoshi (BTC developer) spent building Bitcoin lines up with a hole in the real Satoshi’s resume, where it’s not clear what he was doing or working on. Finally, there’s the fact that Satoshi sought and claimed no link to Bitcoin before a reporter strode up to his house, but also refuses to deny he played a critical part in creating the cryptocurrency. Update: Satoshi now strongly denies any involvement in Bitcoin).
So, a man whose personal fortunate in Bitcoins would still amount to over $400M at current exchange rates remains silent, unwilling to compromise his privacy or turn into a celebrity for the Bitcoin phenomenon.
The troubling privacy issues
There are two ways to consider the privacy angle here. On the one hand, Nakamoto — a man who screens his calls, refuses to speak about his life, and is not on great terms with much of his family — actually used his real name when developing BTC. Granted, he hasn’t gone by “Satoshi” in decades and generally was known as Dorian S. Nakamoto, but forensic analysis was still able to connect the two names.
The larger question is if it’s appropriate to go pouring through someone’s life history when that person has clearly, deliberately made a series of life decisions to remove themselves from the public eye. It’s not clear why Satoshi didn’t use a pseudonym that might have cloaked him better. Maybe he wanted to be found. Maybe he overlooked the fact that his birth certificate still held his original name. But regardless, his general habits of strict privacy and close-mouthed communication, online and offline, including never answering personal questions about his life or motivations when asked by people like Andresen, weren’t sufficient to protect him.
When embarrassing incidents leak to Facebook or YouTube, the common refrain is that the people involved “should have known better,” because once something is online, it’s there forever. Maybe the greater takeaway is that none of us can actually “know better” — that the challenge of remaining completely anonymous is too difficult for even the privacy-minded and generally paranoid.
As a journalist, I admire the dedication and perserverence of Leah Goodman, if her story turns out to be accurate. The story is absolutely fascinating. But as someone who is also concerned about the growing use of personal data tracking by both corporations and governments, I’m bothered by the fact that this story got written in the first place. At what point, exactly, did simply existing become grounds to have one’s entire life published on the internet?
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