Reddit loves Bitcoin; Reddit loves a conspiracy theory. So it’s no surprise that the widely read online forum—the self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet”—reacted with rage, delight, shock, and horror at the news, on Thursday, that Newsweek had unmasked Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s mysterious founder. The electronic currency acquired an early and devoted following on Reddit: in addition to appealing to the site’s libertarian cohort, who quickly gravitated toward the idea of government-free, peer-to-peer money, some of Reddit’s early adopters have made lot of money investing in Bitcoin. It’s not hard to see how Redditors, as they are known, might feel protective toward the father of the first functional cryptocurrency.
In Newsweek, Leah McGrath Goodman cast Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto—a sixty-four-year-old engineer and model-train buff, living in a suburban house in Temple City, California—as the secret genius who set Bitcoin rolling. But on “r/Bitcoin,” the section of Reddit devoted to the digital currency, readers immediately began to express their doubts. “What’s that bullshit, some fan-fiction?” one Redditor, Pyalot, wrote shortly after the Newsweek article was posted. “There’s countless people you could pin Satoshi Nakamoto on. That doesn’t prove shit.” Confirming Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity, Pyalot continued, would require more than circumstantial evidence, or even a face-to-face interview: “Oh, and btw. don’t run to random people, and have them admit to being Satoshi Nakamoto, that’s just a wee bit crazy. You know how you’ll get confirmation? Have him sign a message using a private key of coins known to be his, and have him post that message using his forum account.”
Newsweek had staked a great deal on a story about which knowledgeable Bitcoin observers immediately found much to doubt. The press took no heed of remarks like Pyalot’s before setting off on a wild-goose chase to Temple City, on Wednesday afternoon, which ultimately elicited a formal denial from Dorian Nakamoto, who told an Associated Press reporter that he had not heard of Bitcoin before Newsweek contacted his son, a few weeks earlier.
Nobody in the worlds of cryptography and peer-to-peer (P2P) networking had ever been able to identify the Satoshi Nakamoto who invented Bitcoin, though he (or she, or they) had posted on a number of online forums well before Bitcoin was launched. (Joshua Davis wrote about the search for Nakamoto in 2011.)
Though Satoshi Nakamoto wrote hundreds of online posts, as well as the original 2008 Bitcoin protocol, he included no details about where he’d lived, worked, or studied, and there was no trace of him on search engines. He was nonexistent outside Internet forums, where he discussed only technical matters. In the early days of Bitcoin, it seemed possible that Satoshi Nakamoto was guarding his privacy because he was a professor or a Wall Street quant—someone whose employment might be unpleasantly compromised or complicated if he were discovered to be moonlighting. This raises the question of why someone who’d been so obviously invested in maintaining his anonymity would choose to post under his own surname.
At this point, we have still not seen conclusive proof that connects the identities of Dorian Nakamoto and Satoshi Nakamoto. (It is worth noting here that Dorian Nakamoto told the Associated Press that one of the strongest pieces of evidence presented by Newsweek, his statement, “I am no longer involved in that,” was a reference not to Bitcoin but to his work as an engineer on classified government projects.) No one who’d been in on the alleged secret came forward to corroborate Newsweek’s story, and no computer evidence of any kind—correspondence, keys, software—has been obtained, let alone vetted.
Furthermore, it doesn’t take a cryptography expert to see the contrast between Dorian Nakamoto’s English writing and that of the Bitcoin inventor. It’s fair to say that the anonymity of Bitcoin made the Newsweek reporter’s task unusually difficult. But Bitcoin observers familiar with the writing of the real Nakamoto were flabbergasted by the suggestion that he (or she, or they) and Dorian Nakamoto might be one and the same. If so, Nakamoto was a master of disguise.
Some Reddit users may have been motivated by an intense devotion to Satoshi’s cryptocurrency, but, rather than taking their skepticism seriously, many media outlets pounced instead on the story of their “rage,” scouring the site for examples of death threats, violence, or outright lunacy, which were then published with much fanfare. Writing on Salon, Andrew Leonard mocked the “fury” of Reddit, saying, “To people who live in the real world, the sound and fury seems mostly absurd.”
Reddit can be absurd, certainly, but on balance its contributors seemed to be on better terms with reality than some media professionals. On Thursday, Dorian Nakamoto’s house was immediately staked out by a flock of reporters. The mild-mannered train enthusiast was eventually whisked to downtown Los Angeles, where he spent two hours convincing the Associated Press that he wouldn’t know a bitcoin if it smacked him with a tire iron.
The true inventor of Bitcoin disappeared from the Internet in the spring of 2011, and is thought to have amassed between eight hundred thousand and a million bitcoins, worth perhaps half a billion dollars at today’s rate of exchange. Fear for Dorian Nakamoto’s safety ran high on Reddit; this was not unreasonable, given the danger inherent in publicizing an exact location where drives or negotiable paper wallets containing half a billion dollars might be stored. Bitcoin thieves, as a rule, don’t get caught, which made the hypothetical threat more serious. The chance of being apprehended for stealing cryptocurrency is so low that the usual disincentive to commit theft is almost nonexistent.
Many of the angry Reddit comments pointed to photographs, published alongside Newsweek’s story, which clearly showed the address of Dorian Nakamoto’s house, as well as the license-plate number of his car, making it easy to trace his location. It made sense for the press to visit Dorian Nakamoto to ask him questions, but it does seem that better steps could have been taken to protect the man’s privacy in the process.
A bitcoin, as Joshua Davis wrote, is “no paper, copper, or silver.” It’s a string of characters identifying a specific address—kind of like a bank-account number, but one that requires a special, complicated key to open. One way to understand a bitcoin is as a lock that comes with a key. Anyone can see where the lock is, but the key—a very, very long string of characters—is private. You can write the key down on a piece of paper, or store it on a thumb drive or a hard drive. If you lose the key, the lock can never be opened. But, if you leave the key unattended, online or off, someone can open the lock and empty out whatever is in the account, leaving no trail.
Along with the panic and the anger on Reddit, there was an alleged death threat to Goodman, and some details of her personal life were published online. (These have since been removed.) At the same time, there were touching words of sympathy for Dorian Nakamoto, along with offers of help for him and his family. One poster, who called himself Nakamotodragon and said that he was “affiliated with the media’s Nakamoto family,” thanked the Redditors for their kindness, but warned, “None of us know how to use bitcoins! Please do not get scammed into thinking you are donating directly to us!” (According to Bloomberg, by Monday morning, one effort to raise money for Dorian Nakamoto and his family had taken in twenty-eight thousand dollars.)
The roller-coaster history of Bitcoin includes triumphs and catastrophes, none of which tempted Satoshi Nakamoto to comment. Neither the recent crash of the Mt. Gox exchange nor the arrest of BitInstant’s Charlie Shrem; neither the outlawing of Bitcoin in Russia nor the Chinese government’s attempt to halt the exchange of yuan into Bitcoin elicited so much as a syllable from him. There was conjecture that Satoshi Nakamoto might have died or become incapacitated as his invention grew to become world news, and the years of his silence mounted.
For its creator or creators, the Bitcoin project was clearly politically motivated. Satoshi Nakamoto posted an essay at the P2P Foundation, in 2009, that laid out Bitcoin’s ideological underpinnings:
This last assertion, alas, has not yet been borne out. So far, the story of Bitcoin has done much to illustrate the relative practicality and stability of our current monetary system, flawed as it may be. But it also shows that cryptography has enormous promise for the future of human transactions, because of its capacity to verify those transactions in a foolproof and transparent way.
Libertarians and others who venerate independence and personal freedom are apt to imagine that third parties can be removed from the process, but that is rarely the case. Even within the world of Bitcoin, whose system for generating new coins may be hacker-proof, actual transactions often require a third party—an entrepreneur, a guarantor, a middleman. There’s all kind of meddling and bumbling and chicanery and confusion, and it’s not limited to governments, bankers, or politicians. Third parties are everywhere. They might be phishers or hackers or the crooked operators of a cryptocurrency exchange. They might be a bunch of journalists chasing the wrong man on a Los Angeles freeway. They might be sympathizers taking up a collection on Reddit for an innocent bystander whose name too closely resembles the pseudonym used by Bitcoin’s creator. Even the brief history of Bitcoin is full of breaches of trust. If Satoshi Nakamoto has any thoughts about that, we may never learn them.
On Thursday night, a very short comment appeared on the P2P Foundation by a poster named Satoshi Nakamoto. For longtime Bitcoin watchers, this was the most shocking event of the day. The poster’s account had been dormant for several years, and it undoubtedly belongs to the inventor of Bitcoin: it was used, in 2009, to announce the introduction of Bitcoin, and the e-mail address corresponding to the account is the same one used on the original Bitcoin protocol, published by him (or her, or them) in 2008. It said, simply, “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.”
Reddit is owned by Advance Publications, the corporate parent of Condé Nast, the publisher of The New Yorker.
Illustration: Grafilu
