Bitcoin Inventor Satoshi Nakamoto Outed By Newsweek

DoctorBit writes "According to today's Newsweek article, Satoshi Nakamoto is ... Satoshi Nakamoto — a 64-year-old Japanese-American former defense contractor living with his mother in a modest Temple City, California suburban home. According to the article, 'He is someone with a penchant for collecting model trains and a career shrouded in secrecy, having done classified work for major corporations and the U.S. military.' and 'Nakamoto's family describe him as extremely intelligent, moody and obsessively private, a man of few words who screens his phone calls, anonymizes his emails and, for most of his life, has been preoccupied with the two things for which Bitcoin has now become known: money and secrecy.' The article quotes him as responding when asked about bitcoin, '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.' I imagine that he will now have to move and hire round-the-clock security for his own protection."

Comments

Why?

[Chalnoth]

Why would he have to move/hire protection? I guess I can see that he might be paranoid enough to think it's necessary, but why would it be actually necessary?

Re:Why?

[johnsie]

People do crazy things when money and power is involved. He's right to want to protect himself.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's now public that he's sitting on nearly half a billion dollars somewhere.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would he have to move/hire protection? I guess I can see that he might be paranoid enough to think it's necessary, but why would it be actually necessary?

He is now a target for anyone who wants a potentially huge stash of BTC... whether it is really him or not, someone will presume it is.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because his personal stash of bitcoins are worth $400 million dollars?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's surmised that he personally mined enough bitcoins to be worth roughly $400,000,000 at today's exchange rate. That's enticing.

Re:Why?

[interkin3tic]

Because once Newsweek finds you, they'll pester you to death to subscribe, for interviews, to talk about them, to let people know that they didn't die completely when they went online only, and can you spare some change for a sandwich.

Re:Why?

[SJHillman]

That seems like the sort of thing that should have gone in the summary, because it's a vital piece of information for having the summary make sense.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong, but it does match the public misconception. It's commonly believed that he's sitting on nearly half a billion dollars, and facts to the contrary won't even slow down those who will try to collect.

This is why if you ever do anything in your life that people might want to know about, never EVER answer a request for an interview with anything that could even be used to find a bit of truth. "Off the record" means "this will get into the headline" and everything you say can and will be used against you to get pageviews. The two best responses to a request for an interview are to file a restraining order and if that doesn't work, spend a couple bitcoins on an assassin.

Re:Why?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Why would he have to move/hire protection? I guess I can see that he might be paranoid enough to think it's necessary, but why would it be actually necessary?

Given the sorts of weirdos who end up stalking ordinary celebrities, I'd flee this gravity well at relativistic speed if I were The Celebrity among some of the more... peculiar... elements of bitcoin fandom.

Re:Why?

[Joce640k]

I suspect the real number is a secret but you can safely bet he owns quite a few of them....

Re:Why?

[mark-t]

What makes his so-called stash of bitcoins worth the effort of trying to go after him for a cut any more than how wealthy any one of the other multimillionaires or billionaires in the world happens to be?

Re:Why?

[SpankiMonki]

Why would he have to move/hire protection? I guess I can see that he might be paranoid enough to think it's necessary, but why would it be actually necessary?

Why? Because the poor man is about to get seriously Salingered.

Re:Why?

[Thud457]

that would suck so bad to be KTK'd for something even more imaginary and worthless than the usual little green pieces of paper.

Re:Why?

[sunking2]

There are lots of rich people in the world. Most don't hire personal security. I've yet to see an entourage of folks accompany Warren Buffet into Dairy Queen when he wants a blizzard.

Re:Why?

[Citizen of Earth]

Because he may be in possession of millions of bitcoins? I'm sure some unscrupulous people would like to unlawfully acquire them.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

The two best responses to a request for an interview are to file a restraining order and if that doesn't work, spend a couple bitcoins on an assassin.

Because those never draw more attention. Although maybe the latter will work in the not so distant future when there is only one journalist left.

Re:Why?

[katterjohn]

Probably to protect him from more reporters who like to find obsessively private people, poke them with a stick and post everything online.

Re:Why?

[Deadstick]

Because with the events of the last week or so, certain people have lost a LOT of money. Sure, it may not be his fault, but issues like this are sometimes settled...ummm...out of court.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because a lot of people got bit by the bitcoin scam, and some will no doubt seek revenge.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Plenty of billionaires have security at their homes, and most of their money in banks and assets that require tricking/bypassing multiple people to get to.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask George Soros how he travels when he's in Argentina.

Re:Why?

[gmuslera]

Oblig xkcd. He is the weakest link in the unbreakable encryption of his bitcoin wallet.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

What makes his so-called stash of bitcoins worth the effort of trying to go after him for a cut any more than how wealthy any one of the other multimillionaires or billionaires in the world happens to be?

What makes you think the others are not targets as well? A few years ago there was a TV interview with a couple who had won a record Powerball jackpot, several hundred million dollars. When interviewed they didn't know how many bodyguards they had hired. The day after they won.

Re:Why?

[i kan reed]

Especially among people whose inclinations include avoiding governments at all costs.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

George Soros has enemies that are mostly unrelated to his money...

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah they took ur jobs! took ur coins! (sp quote... )

i understand his point of view, but the man only invented the concept/ thing in the beginning... unfortunately the're a lot of dumbasses out there (tuk ur jooohhhbs... ) so he might be right about searching protection....

Re:Why?

[geekoid]

""Off the record" means "this will get into the headline""
and you base that on...what, exactly?

Re:Why?

[MisterSquid]

This is why if you ever do anything in your life that people might want to know about, never EVER answer a request for an interview with anything that could even be used to find a bit of truth. "Off the record" means "this will get into the headline" and everything you say can and will be used against you to get pageviews. The two best responses to a request for an interview are to file a restraining order and if that doesn't work, spend a couple bitcoins on an assassin.

Your advice is a good one for subjects of a possible exposé or smear campaign, however, out of hand dismissing journalists as people without integrity is not in the best interests of an informed public and (probably) in many cases unwarranted.

When I was a university professor, the Chronicle of Higher Education asked for an interview about what it's like to be single and a new faculty (ha!). I agreed to an interview and, on several occasions, said that I wanted to say a few things "off the record" about the behavior of colleagues and the spouses of colleagues (ahem). Some of what I said off the record was juicy and I told my interviewer those things to contextualize my "on the record" remarks.

The article was published, my female colleague who was written up got a couple of marriage proposals, and everything attributed to me was on the up and up.

I know not all journalists adhere to a code of ethics, but I believe that many do. Clamming up when a story needs to get out may protect you, but one needn't be suspicious form the get go.

Re:Why?

[MickyTheIdiot]

When Soros spends money on campaigns it's bad.

When Koch spends money on campaigns it's good.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is only one possible reply to this, and that's FUCK YOU.

Re:Why?

[sunking2]

Which is exactly the same as someone living in California with their mother and has no apparent political influence at all.

Re:Why?

[Chris Mattern]

I know not all journalists adhere to a code of ethics, but I believe that many do.

Problem is, it can be tough to know which kind you've got until it's too late.

Re:Why?

[Pope]

Because it's now public that he's sitting on nearly half a billion dollars somewhere.

He's not sitting on anything but 800,000 internet fun bucks until he cashes them into real money.

Re:Why?

[geekoid]

Because if he dies and didn't leave an error, that mean those bitcoins are off the market making the other bitcoins worth more.

Re:Why?

[geekoid]

Nope.
Soros does it out of necessity to try and stop the Koch brothers from destroying the country.
Soros want's the amount of control that comes from donating money removed. However how do you do that in the current system? If you don't play while your trying to fix it, you lose.

You should probably look at what they do and their reasons.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's just easier to hack the bitcoins off the exchanges in the privacy of your own home in your pajamas than to actually have to get off your couch and go outside to track him down.

Re:Why?

[Mr. Slippery]

People do crazy things when money and power is involved.

Neither of which will be involved once the Bitcoin fad ends.

Re:Why?

[schnell]

"Off the record" means "this will get into the headline"

No offense, but you have no idea what you're talking about. In journalism, certain words have certain meanings and any journalist working for a reputable publication will adhere to those strictly.

"Off the record" means "I am telling you, Mr./Ms. Reporter, because I think you should know, but you can't print it or link it to me." The information may still show up in the article because there is no prohibition on "second sourcing," however - it means that if I say "off the record, X got fired for embezzling" and the reporter asks someone else that question and they say yes with it not being off the record, then it's fair game. Experienced interviewees use "off the record" as a tool to either influence the reporter's contextual view of the situation or to lead them to ask questions of other people in that direction. Inexperienced interviewees don't know how to use it, or are not good about making very clear what is on/off the record, and frequently end up getting burned.

Similarly, "on background" means "You can report this piece of information, but you can't say it was me who told you." Whenever you read a story that says "Senior administration officials said..." it is because the person who told that to the reporter said it "on background." It's usually used when people want to get information out but they would get in trouble if people knew who it was that said it.

These are the kinds of rules that a reporter from The Washington Post, CNN or other "mainstream media" outlets will follow scrupulously. If you're talking to someone from Huffington Post, Gawker or sensationalist rags like that - not so much. That's why it's very important to know whom you're talking to and judge the information you disclose accordingly.

Dealing with the media is pretty straightforward if you know the rules, but most "regular" people (i.e. not celebrities, politicians, etc.) don't know or understand the rules and they can be burned by them. The bottom line is that if you are savvy and experienced with the media, you can use tools like "off the record" and "on background" to your benefit. If you are not experienced, the best idea is to avoid them and not say anything that you do not want to see in print, connected to your name.

The two best responses to a request for an interview are to file a restraining order

Oh, and by the way, as a former reporter, I can tell you that if I asked you for an interview and you tried to get a restraining order, that would 1.) never be granted by a judge, and 2.) would make me dig into your story far more deeply because I'm pretty sure you have something to hide. If you have nothing to hide but just don't want to do the interview for privacy reasons (or you suspect the agenda of the reporter), simply decline the interview politely or ask to do it by e-mail where you will have the ability to consider your answers and have everything in writing in case your are misquoted. If you do actually have something to hide, either just decline the interview request or - preferably - have your lawyer answer it.

Re:Why?

[Ralph Wiggam]

From the blockchain records, someone mined almost a million coins in the very very early days. There were a few small outgoing transactions, and then haven't been touched since Satoshi disappeared in 2011. It doesn't make much sense for those bitcoins to belong to anyone else.

Re:Why?

[Threni]

Allowed to write books pretty much in peace for 50 years?

Re:Why?

[OverlordQ]

> Wrong, but it does match the public misconception. It's commonly believed that he's sitting on nearly half a billion dollars, and facts to the contrary won't even slow down those who will try to collect.

So where did those coins go then if you say he doesn't have them.

Re:Why?

[Attila Dimedici]

Wow, you really believe that? You believe that a man who as a teenager helped the Nazis loot the Jews of Europe before killing them (after having been taken in by a non-Jewish family so that he was not killed by the Nazis along with his Jewish parents) only does what he does "out of necessity".? And its not like that childhood action was not followed up by similar behavior as an adult (not as blatantly evil, but with a similar disregard for how his actions negatively effected others).

Re:Why?

[chfriley]

He was storing them at Gox?

Re:Why?

[egcagrac0]

Although maybe the latter will work in the not so distant future when there is only one journalist left.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Journalistic perception. If someone refuses to speak to a journalist, for any reason, it is implied that a story exists there despite evidence to the contrary.

When everything is viewed as dirt, context becomes irrelevant.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hitler does it out of necessity to stop the Jews from destroying the country." FTFY
Godwin for the win!

Re:Why?

[JoeMerchant]

I don't know about GP's experience, but any time I have explained anything to a reporter, it has come out printed as something completely twisted from it's original meaning. Case in point: told reporter "our technology has flown on Space Shuttle missions", printed in story: "Company Vice President says "their technology is going to the Moon!"" with the implication that the company stock is going to "rocket up" in value.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I get that there are people who keep their word (wholly or at least 'technically') with things like 'off the record'. At the same time ...

[puts cynical cap on]
If I'm gong to be talking to to someone whose livelihood is to publish things that gets more views/readership/whatever ... I'm not going to trust 'off the record' one bit. if I don't want it on the record, I don't say it for or write/type it for anyone outside of those I explicitly trust. Some journalist would not fall into that circle. If I don't want something indexed by Google, I don't put it on the web anywhere ... robots.txt 'protecting' it [snorts] or not.

It's that simple, really.

Re:Why?

[RightSaidFred99]

No, he isn't. He should try to sell $0.5Bn and see how much money he actually gets. It's like having stock - you need a buyer.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

""Off the record" means "this will get into the headline""
and you base that on...what, exactly?

"Off the record" means "I will deny having told you this when your fact checker calls me to verify that you aren't making it up".

It's how you tell the journalist something while warning them that they will have to keep digging for another source if they want to be able to credibly print the info basicly the same as "you didn't hear it from me, but...".

However with fact checking being out of fashion and journalists competing more on who gets the story first than who's story is verifiably true it's wiser to just not say anything you don't want to see attributed to you in print.

Re:Why?

[DerekLyons]

"Off the record" means "this will get into the headline" and everything you say can and will be used against you to get pageviews.

Having actually been an "off the record"source on multiple occasions, I can firmly say you're full of it.

Re:Why?

[DaveV1.0]

The two best responses to a request for an interview are to file a restraining order and if that doesn't work, spend a couple bitcoins on an assassin

This comment states one of the best response to a request for an interview is to murder the requester and it is now at +5 interesting? What the actual fuck, people? The person who posted this comment is apparently a paranoid psychopath and you are effectively praising him.

Re:Why?

[Copid]

I could definitely see some of the people who lose a ton of money if/when the Bitcoin fad ends deciding to blame the guy who started it all rather than themselves for jumping in.

Re:Why?

[DaveV1.0]

All the bitcoins would revert to his living relatives. He lives with his mother. Therefore, he has at least one heir. If he as siblings, cousins, etc. then they are up for a share too.

Re:Why?

[DaveV1.0]

And, from the Koch brothers' and their supporters' views the Koch brothers are doing it out of necessity to try and stop Soros and his ilk from destroying the country.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, as the article points out, he quite probably owns a bitcoin wallet worth about $400 million. Whether or not he still has access to it, the perception that he does provides an awful lot of reasons to worry about personal safety.

Re:Why?

[Forbo]

I'm sorry, but what is "KTK'd"? I tried searching for it on a few different sites but can't come up with anything that seems remotely relevant.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would he have to move/hire protection? I guess I can see that he might be paranoid enough to think it's necessary, but why would it be actually necessary?

Because it fits with the massive Slashdot dichotomy of egotism/insecurity to think that he would need massive security.

You're right, no one's going after this guy. No one in the Government cares about bitcoin outside of the criminal enterprises it enables; it's too small to be a threat to a State's monopoly on it's currency. Physically robbing him would do nothing; his money is either in bitcoins (electronic) or cashed out into dollars in a bank, not stashed in stacks of $100's under his mattress. Cracking bitcoin security? Who cares? When two of the major exchanges were wiped out and people lost their money, then faith in the currency drops and so does it's value. That does far more damage than hacking it's encryption, so there's not much value there either.

Re:Why?

[UnknownSoldier]

> Why would he have to move/hire protection?

Blackmail and/or Gunpoint.

Your or your children/wife can't be used for blackmail, held at gunpoint, etc. if they don't know who you are.

Re:Why?

[Dan East]

It makes sense for him to keep them as bitcoins, especially given his personality and past experiences. It isn't real money until it's been converted into.... real money. Thus it can't be taxed at this point. There is no reason for him to try and cash out now when at least 50% of it would go to the government. It makes far more sense to only very gradually exchange a few bitcoins as needed for expenses as you go. Yes, the value of his bitcoins may depreciate significantly (which really hasn't been the case over the long term), but considering the option is to lose 50% immediately (and get scrutinized by the government, etc), it still makes more sense to hang onto them. Even if they devalue down to $1 each, he is still sitting on $800,000.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Republicans. Just like happened with Autumn Radtke, they are going to go on the offensive. The fact that the racist, CONservative paper has admitted to lying about calling it a suicide when the police say it isn't, we know they are covering up something. Considering the number of times those Republicans have been hauled before congress for murder, we all know what they want to do here. They fear Bitcoin so they are going to stick to their usual scared tactics. They hate and want to destroy things they're not smart enough to comprehend. Just look at how they enjoy killing cows.

Re:Why?

[perpenso]

"off the market" and "legally own" are two different things. There is no "I forgot my password" link for bitcoins.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Common sense? Surely somebody with a low UID such as yourself can infer the obvious from OPs statement. It isn't rocket science that admitting a connection between yourself and a high-profile project off the record will still lead to journalists of lesser integrity reporting that information.

Re:Why?

[lgw]

No offense, but you have no idea what you're talking about. In journalism, certain words have certain meanings and any journalist working for a reputable publication will adhere to those strictly.

Hahahhahaha! Reputable publication - great joke, didn't see that one coming.

Anyone who sees the news as anything but "fiction, based on a true story" is blind. And it's amazing how often we fall for this - we'll read some story we have personal knowledge of, notice that every single statement is wrong and misleading, then turn the page and believe what we read. If it's not the sports page, it's fiction.

Re:Why?

[nurb432]

Even better: Why was his privacy violated by Newsweek in the first place?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

This comment states one of the best response to a request for an interview is to murder the requester and it is now at +5 interesting?

Well, while the best course would clearly be to murder all reporters, I think that's an undue burden for the requestee - one reporter at a time will get us to the desired result eventually. "That's one less horror in the world!"

Re:Why?

[lgw]

As anyone who lived through the dot-com bust knows: never defer taking gains for tax reasons. Better to give half to the government than lose it all when the bubble bursts.

But I highly doubt he has that many bitcoins - I suspect most of the bitcoins mined in the early days were simply lost soon thereafter, as they weren't valuable enough to be worth keeping track of. No reason to think he had a significant share of the early BTC, even if he did hold on to his own.

 

Re:Why?

[SethJohnson]

Dan,

Doublecheck your math to decide whether it's more lucrative for the inventor to cash out now or sit on a stash of $400,000,000 worth of bitcoin.

Even if they devalue down to $1 each, he is still sitting on $800,000.

Paying 50% in taxes would leave him with $200,000,000. Your proposed scenario fills his pockets with $800,000.

Also consider that he's a scientist who works on military contracts. With secret clearance and California cost-of-living inflated salaries, this guy is already pulling in paychecks of over $300,000 per year.

Your scenario of pulling in an $800k payday probably isn't very attractive to him.

Re:Why?

[lgw]

I think one of the biggest problems we have in the country is this rampant cronyism where all these large companies are into smash-and-grab, short-term profits, and that's true even at the local level ... We end up with a two-tier system. Those that have, have welfare for the rich.

- Charles Koch

Yeah, those evil Koch brothers and their country-destroying messages. Sure wouldn't want them spreading their view to the public! C'mon, viewing everything in the world through a political lens is foolish.

Re:Why?

[Kremmy]

In some ways, Bitcoin bootstrapped itself on the black market. If the Bitcoin fad ends, I see no reason to believe it won't stay steady and strong in the dark undercurrents like the other currency alternatives (Ukash?) in place and being used for such things. Is that scary?

Re:Why?

[SethJohnson]

Here's the difference.

If a gang of thugs captures Warren Buffet, there's not a lot they can torture out of the old codger. It's not believed he has secret knowledge that may be worth billions of dollars.

There could easily be foreign criminal syndicates who could suspect Nakamoto knows a secret backdoor to the algorithm that can be exploited to easily generate bitcoins. The potential riches might be incentive for them to gamble a kidnapping and torture operation.

Lots of wealthy people DO hire security to accompany them in public places. Remember the false-flag conspiracy theories about the private contractors standing around the finish line at the Boston Marathon during last year's bombing? Those guys were security hired by wealthy people running in the marathon. The risk of kidnapping does exist for people in the US. Patty Hearst can corroborate that.

Re:Why?

[GameboyRMH]

Fact checker? Even for the stuffy old companies who have such a person on staff, some stories are Too Good To Fact Check!

Re:Why?

[Ralph Wiggam]

According to Newsweek, he hasn't had a job since 2001.

Re:Why?

[SethJohnson]

What makes his so-called stash of bitcoins worth the effort of trying to go after him for a cut any more than how wealthy any one of the other multimillionaires or billionaires in the world happens to be?

This is pure speculation, but that's all we have to work with right now.

Nakamoto has worked as a scientist on several secret military projects. This has given him some insight into the ongoing US government research into time travel technology. He must know that by attaching his own identity to the creation of bitcoin, he would become a lucrative target for criminal time travelers. By keeping his identity anonymous, he was protected against time travelers visiting him on the day he created the algorithm and having it stolen from him.

Re:Why?

[epine]

The person who posted this comment is apparently a paranoid psychopath and you are effectively praising him.

Apparently, paranoid psychopathic trolls are tightly knit.

But no problem. It'll be +500 in another hour, +50,000 by tomorrow afternoon, and then wrap back around to zero, at which point he loses his quarter and his game is over.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now where did I say anything about campaign spending...or the
Koch brothers for that matter?

In fact you missed the point that Soros is a polarizing figure not because of how he uses his money in campaigns, but how he acquired his money..through currency speculation.

Soros and others Wall Street profiteers add nothing of value of society, they just reap unearned profits....

Now go suck on that you fucking pig.

Re:Why?

[Immerman]

Would the corollary then be "If they're telling the truth, it doesn't matter"?

It's a sad state of affairs - there was a time when (some of) the media could (mostly) be trusted, it was even recognized by the US founders as a vital element of a free democracy and explicitly protected in the constitution. The internet has the potential to take up at least much of the slack, but we really to work out some way to separate the truth from submarine PR campaigns the ravings of paranoid nut cases.

Re:Why?

[tacokill]

Ding ding ding. We have a winner.

Unfortunately, the balance of power is completely in the hands of the reporter. You don't know anything about the reporter's ethics until it's too late.

Which brings to mind one of my favorite cliches: Don't ever get into an argument with a man who buys ink by the barrel.

Re:Why?

[slashmydots]

That is almost definitely not true. There is zero solid evidence that he owns or has ever owned bitcoins in large amounts. When people thought he was the founder of silkroad or one of the original protocol/client software designers, that's where most of the rumor started. It sounds like he isn't so he isn't rich.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Off the record means you can't quote the person by name. So if I let you interview me, and then say, "but let me tell you, off the record, [insert something salacious]", if and when the journalist discloses the salacious bits, he has to keep my name out of it.

Professional journalists will often not disclose OTR information directly, because professional journalists are supposed to be able to cite all their sources of information. But professional journalism is dying, and it's common to find headlines backed by OTR (and therefore effectively anonymous and dubious) disclosures.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the idea that nobody ever talks about the tools an interviewee has to communicate to the interviewer of what or how anything they say might be published if at all. At most, I see in the TV or movies the "Off the record" used and never really explain why or when. It mostly is used to say "hey, this information here, I shouldn't be telling you this, but have at it" or "it's classified, but have it anyway".

I understand that there isn't much need to teach every citizen how to be an interviewee (most don't need it, let's be honest). My biggest point is: if any regular person is ever found in such situation, the "avoid interviews and don't say anything that you don't want to see in print, connected to your name" seems like a bit... *sigh*.

Maybe I'm not cut out to be a reporter. There are many things that I would not do for the sake of a story. One of them would be abuse inexperienced interviewees and end up screwing their lives. At least not intentionally.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean this?

"Later that year, at age 14, Soros lived with and posed as the godson of an employee of the Hungarian Ministry of Agriculture. The official was at one point ordered to inventory the remaining contents of the estate of a wealthy Jewish family that had fled the country; rather than leave the young Soros alone in the city, the official brought him along. The next year, 1945, Soros survived the Battle of Budapest, in which Soviet and German forces fought house-to-house through the city"

Yeah, those dirty Jews being protected from enslavement or death by sneaking around under pseudonyms. How dare they!

Now, tell me all about how if Snowden was a true patriot he would've stayed in the United States and fought his espionage charges in court (despite having absolutely no legal defense whatsoever).

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Soros and others Wall Street profiteers add nothing of value of society, they just reap unearned profits....

Incorrect. Currency speculation provides value: it provides liquidity to markets

In the market, some people are willing to sell a currency for $X. Others want to buy a currency for $Y.

Speculators discover buyers and sellers and match them together (increasing liquidity). The speculator's profit comes out of the difference between X and Y (assuming he reads the market correctly and acted accordingly)

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Many believe that Satoshi Nakamoto has a LARGE number of bitcoins that were mined when the bitcoin technology was being developed.

People may try to hurt him or his family to get them.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Supreme Chancellor: Good is a point of view, Anakin. The Koch and the Soros are similar in almost every way, including their quest for greater power.

Re:Why?

[brokenin2]

He's not sitting on anything but 800,000 internet fun bucks until he cashes them into real money.

I think you mean until he caches them into United States fun bucks..

Re:Why?

[mythosaz]

Kidnapped? Tortured? Killed?

My vote, anyway. They seem fun.

Re:Why?

[Reilaos]

The loss of money is still the involvement of money.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I know.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

When Obi-Wan uses force powers on an Imperial, it's good.

When Vader uses force powers on an Imperial, it's bad?

Fight the hypocrisy of the "New" Republik!!

Re:Why?

[GodInHell]

Fucking insane ideas are also interesting - not good - but certainly interesting. More seriously, when I mod, I tend to up-vote both sides of a conversation as long as the responses are civil and well-thought-out. Interesting is what I usually use for "I don't agree, and don't see anything informative, but you have a valid point of view and are contributing to the conversation" or "that's fucking nuts and the best way to prove it is to raise the profile of this post so people can discuss its implications".

Re:Why?

[lennier]

Because if he dies and didn't leave an error

.... not even a kernel panic?

Re:Why?

[lennier]

By keeping his identity anonymous, he was protected against time travelers visiting him on the day he created the algorithm and having it stolen from him.

Well, now we know what John Titor was really looking for with his leet IBM 5100 mining rig.

Re:Why?

[laura20]

A reporter asking questions about a public, newsworthy paper you published under your own name is not a violation of your privacy.

Re:Why?

[mattack2]

If it's not the sports page, it's fiction.

Based upon the Olympics, some of that is fiction too.. (e.g. biased "judging")

Re:Why?

[nurb432]

The paper should be shut down and every reporter involved fined, jailed and stripped of their rights.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I only have half of the internet fun bucks I had a few years back. I'm now sitting on 10000% ROI and don't care what the rest of my internet fun bucks are worth later. You jelly?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who has had to go through extensive media training because of this...

Just because the journalist is ethical, doesn't mean they understand what they write. Case in point is the post a couple up from yours where the poster told a reporter that some technology was being used on space shuttle, but the reporter used "going to the moon" because it was close enough and it allowed a good pun / double meaning. It was probably an honest mistake (it's all astronauts and space to the public).

SUMMARY: Journalists want their story to read well / catch eyeballs, so their choice of language can sometimes result in misleading articles.

I have had the same thing happen to me often (public sports star).
(posting as anonymous for this reason).

Re:Why?

[icebike]

Why would he have to move/hire protection? I guess I can see that he might be paranoid enough to think it's necessary, but why would it be actually necessary?

Read it and weep:

http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/0...

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

So all you said above was "regular people get fucked over by the media because they dont know the rules"? you call that a defense of the media? Outing the BC inventor is just another pointles media-stunt. it is in nobodies interrest but money making media. You ruin lives for profit. I have 0 repect for that.

Re:Why?

[letherial]

when anyone spends a exuberant amount of money to influence politics its bad....Even a little bit can corrupt.

your general assumptions on the whole of a population is ignorance in a astounding form, bravo!

Re: Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aww, missed the train.

Re:Why?

[bkcallahan]

You need to find different contacts, an assassin should cost you .5 BTC at most.

Re:Why?

[ssufficool]

No wait... it's a billion dollars now... wait, now it's $100,000.... whoops, now a quarter million. Oh good it finally stabilized at "It's all gone and I have no recourse".

Re:Why?

[SethJohnson]

The dots are starting to connect now, aren't they?

Re:Why?

[The Raven]

This is ancient, but at least you will read it: A lot of rich people in the world don't have half a billion dollars in fungible cash lying around. They have it in tracable, lockable, secured accounts with reversible transactions.

If someone gets access to Satoshi's bitcoin wallet, there will be no recourse to prevent them taking that entire amount. It's a lot harder to steal Warren's money because it's tied up in assets and traceable accounts.

Horrible Journalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, they put this guys life in danger. Shame on them.

Re:Horrible Journalism

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Seriously, they put this guys life in danger. Shame on them.

These are 'journalists', in the dreadful contemporary sense. If they thought that 'quiet, eccentric, mathematician brutally murdered in suspected cyber-revenge' would have an ROI greater than the legal exposure, they'd probably kill him themselves just to be first to the body...

Re:Horrible Journalism

[Anonymous Psychopath]

Seriously, they put this guys life in danger. Shame on them.

If he wanted to remain anonymous perhaps he should not have used his own name? It was only a matter of time and enough interest to investigate given that starting point. And if Newsweek found him so easily, and if he's held a security clearance as reported, it's reasonable to believe the government has known who he since pretty much whenever the question first popped up. His life is in no more danger today than last week.

Re:Horrible Journalism

[iluvcapra]

What, because anybody who's rich is in danger?

Or because now the CIA/NSA/Fed/Bavarian Illuminatus/Zeta Reticulans will "get" him or some such nonsense?

Re:Horrible Journalism

[Anonymous Coward]

He could spread a rumor that when they left his house and promised to keep his identity hidden, out of sheer gratitude he gave them half his bitcoin stash.

Re:Horrible Journalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, no one knows where the 'missing coins' are. and as a creator he's easy a logical target. I see more lawsuits 1st then, the mobs come out.

Also Temple City has a very wealthy asian community there, private security should not be a problem, lots of McMansions...

Re:Horrible Journalism

[GameboyRMH]

An average rich person isn't in danger.

A middle-class guy living an average life with no private security, 20ft barbed wire wall, or expanse of ocean or sky between him and the rest of us plebes, with half a billion dollars of relatively easily stealable assets to his name is in danger.

Re:Horrible Journalism

[Anonymous Coward]

"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations."

--Orwell

Re:Horrible Journalism

[NicknamesAreStupid]

Too late, the feeding frenzy has begun -- http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/0...
He is better off wearing a sushi suit in a shark tank.

Re:Horrible Journalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Or alternatively, he put his own life in danger, as well as the lives of many others.

Hiding in plain sight.

[splutty]

Kudos to him for not ever trying to get into the limelight about this.

Not sure what repercussions this will have for him and his family as persons, but it's kind of nice to see this sort of stuff can still happen :)

Guess he got taught well by the diverse companies insisting on secrecy!

Protection?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I imagine that he will now have to move and hire round-the-clock security for his own protection."

Really?

Does Bitcoin work like River City Ransom? If I punch him enough times, will a flood of shiny coins spew from his unconscious body?

Re:Protection?

[Anonymous Coward]

Poor guy, it looks like all the stress from being outed caused him to gain a few pounds. Barf!

Re:Protection?

[camperdave]

If I punch him enough times, will a flood of shiny coins spew from his unconscious body?

Possibly.

Re:Protection?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably not. If he has a Dod background, and was smart enough, and paranoid enough, to create bitcoin and walk away early, then rest assured that he chose (or programmatically generated) passwords and keys too complex and random to readily commit to long term memory. He has probably destroyed and legitimately forgotten passwords that resemble long, random hexadecimal numbers or or Base64 data.

Re:Protection?

[FlyHelicopters]

That's fine, then hit him with the wrench until he tells you were the passwords are written down.

And if he no longer has the passwords, then no, you won't get money, but he'll still end up dead, you would never leave him as a living witness anyway.

Re:Protection?

[freeze128]

Dude! He's not Sonic the Hedgehog!

Conspiracy nuts are going to love this one!

[johnsie]

a career shrouded in secrecy, having done classified work for major corporations and the U.S. military

Re:Conspiracy nuts are going to love this one!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck! That describes me!!!!!!1
And everyone I work with!!!!!!!
And most of Huntsville!!!!11!11!11!

Re:Conspiracy nuts are going to love this one!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

a career shrouded in secrecy, having done classified work for major corporations and the U.S. military

"Taking The System Down From The Inside?" or "The Man's Ultimate Long Con?"

We ask vague, hyperbolic, questions; you fight it out in the comments section!

Re:Conspiracy nuts are going to love this one!

[guruevi]

Not necessarily a conspiracy but his statements only create more questions. A career shrouded in secrecy, having done classified work for major corporations and the U.S. military ending with Bitcoin in which he is no longer involved and cannot discuss it because it's been turned over to other people.

a) Who was his employer when he developed Bitcoin
b) Why did a Japanese citizen work on classified US military projects
c) Why, if it were a personal pet project, is he no longer involved
d) What contractual obligation does he have where he can't discuss it
e) Who are these other people he has turned it over to

Because of it's users' requirement for "privacy" it easily implies you should use Tor or other private networks. If it is an inherent property for Bitcoins to generate a specific signature within common encryption, together with control over the major networks (AT&T, Verizon, ...) and bugs in several SSL/TLS libraries (goto fail, GnuTLS) you can quickly develop a map of the underground Internet, detect undergrounds you aren't aware of yet and possibly open them up to warrantless inspection without anyone being aware.

Re:Conspiracy nuts are going to love this one!

[H0p313ss]

"Taking The System Down From The Inside?" or "The Man's Ultimate Long Con?"

We ask vague, hyperbolic, questions; you fight it out in the comments section!

T H I S I S S L A S H D O T !

*flying kick*

Re:Conspiracy nuts are going to love this one!

[Anonymous Coward]

b) Why did a Japanese citizen work on classified US military projects

He's described as Japanese-American. Last time I checked, WW2 was over and we aren't throwing persons of Japanese descent into internment camps. We might be using people's social networks instead of their census records to make assumptions about their loyalties, but a naturalized US citizen is every bit as American as a native-born American citizen.

Re: Conspiracy nuts are going to love this one!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you've nailed it. By having media flood the airwaves with statements like 'untraceable criminal currency' and the like, it was adopted by the underground who foolishly don't relize it's the absolute most traceable currency ever without any doubt, by design... The bitcoin digital signature would be extremely easy to filter and monitor.. Given that all transactions are permantly logged makes it even more so. Look how fast silkroad was busted! Need anymore proof? I'd say the conspiracy theory has substantial legs!

Re:Conspiracy nuts are going to love this one!

[geekoid]

http://jacobfoxx.com/wp-conten...

Re:Conspiracy nuts are going to love this one!

[Pope]

b) Why did a Japanese citizen work on classified US military projects

Yeah! Like all those damn Germans working on the A-bomb! Who the hell let THEM in?!

Re:Conspiracy nuts are going to love this one!

[Chris Mattern]

b) Why did a Japanese citizen work on classified US military projects

He's not a Japanese citizen. He emigrated to the US with his mother and two brothers when he was ten and is a naturalized US citizen.

Re:Conspiracy nuts are going to love this one!

[pieisgood]

It's not hard to have done this. There are tons of contractors with security clearance.

Re:Conspiracy nuts are going to love this one!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah! Like all those damn Germans working on the A-bomb! Who the hell let THEM in?!

Totally irrelevent to this situation.

Re:Conspiracy nuts are going to love this one!

[Anonymous Coward]

It would not surprise me if some way, somehow, Bitcoin is being used to break encryption and that finding values that produce the 'magic numbers' when they're hashed with SHA-256 is a key to performing some kind of attack, in addition to securing the block chain. Currently the global bitcoin mining network has more computing power than all of the known supercomputers in the world combined. Given his specialty and the fact that this guy did classified work means that it's alarmingly likely that he was involved in signals intelligence.

Just because the protocol doesn't carry out the attack itself doesn't mean that it's not involved in one. If I were looking for a way to brute force encryption I'd take one of the computationally expensive steps involved in a known attack and farm it out in a scheme just like this.

Re:Conspiracy nuts are going to love this one!

[Anonymous Coward]

b) You also let the nazis make the A-bomb for you, so not a big stretch. at least this guy was not obviously evil when they hired him unlike ther nazis.

c) People move on, or are you still working on pottytraining after perfecting it?

a, d) None of our business, plenty of people are under NDAs for various reasons, mostly not very improtant

If the product does what it says, none of your issues are issues, just leave the guy alone and look at the code.

Re:Conspiracy nuts are going to love this one!

[guruevi]

I never knew Nazis made the A-bomb for my country, heck, the Nazis (almost) overran my country.

I never said the product doesn't do what it's supposed to do. There may however be unknown side effects to the reference implementation. The question remains legitimate though, why, if you wanted to create an open, uncontrolled currency are you under an NDA? The two are opposite to each other.

Coming up next...

[Anonymous Coward]

Next time in the news - Bitcoin inventor lynched by angry mob of bitcoin loss sufferers who don't know the difference between inventing a currency and running a "bank".

Protection from what?

[sjbe]

I imagine that he will now have to move and hire round-the-clock security for his own protection.

Protection from what? Bitcoin is not that big of a deal and I cannot conceive of a reason why anyone would care if he invented it or not other than idle curiosity.

Re:Protection from what?

[Anonymous Coward]

He holds and estimated 800,000 BTC, assuming he is Satoshi. That's $525 600 000.00 Reason enough?

Re:Protection from what?

[Anonymous Coward]

The founder of bitcoin mined a crap ton of coins at the start. The guy is likely a bitcoin billionaire. Plenty of reasons for rich people to hire security.

Re:Protection from what?

[mark-t]

No more reason than to hound any of the people on this list, all of whom have provably multiple orders of magnitude more wealth than this guy is even *alleged* to have.

Re:Protection from what?

[Dishevel]

Because if I can get him alone in a room I can get all of that money with no proof I have it. With banks involved it gets much more difficult to get away with stealing $500 million.

Re:Protection from what?

[sjbe]

Because if I can get him alone in a room I can get all of that money with no proof I have it. With banks involved it gets much more difficult to get away with stealing $500 million.

You've have to liquidate it and engage in some pretty serious money laundering through the banks to actually make use of the bitcoins in any meaningful way. Furthermore even if he does have 800K bitcoins he doesn't have $500M. To convert that many bitcoins to dollars would crash the market. When you hold that large a percentage of a market you can't sell without moving the market. The price would plummet if any significant amount was sold so while we can't tell exactly what it is worth you can be sure it is a LOT less than $500M.

Re:Protection from what?

[mysidia]

That's $525 600 000.00 Reason enough?

Entirely theoretical. If he attempted to get cash for 5% of his holdings, the market price would likely crash, and he would eventually be left with no buyer for the rest.

Re:Protection from what?

[HeckRuler]

And they probably have round-the-clock security as a matter of habit. Because that's the lifestyle of the ludicrously filthy rich.
New money don't nessesarily have that sort of experience with being rich and might not yet have security.

It's like, imagine you're a bank robber and you've got two banks in town. One is an old-school bank that has thwarted dozens of bank robbers in the past and routinely. They hire people specifically to worry about bank robbers. On the other side of town, there's this new hip young bank that's getting money thrown at them like mad. They used to just take all the money home with them at the end of the night, but now they've got this new "cold storage" place to put money they're not using at the moment. They're known to be idiotic fools, everything thinks the whole thing is a fly-by-night operation, and they don't even have a safe.

Now which one do you rob?

Also there's a good chance that Satoshi has these bitcoins on a hard-drive in his home. Of course, I'd expect it to be encrypted, but there are probably idiots out there who think they could simply walk in and take his bitcoins. And when you're talking about protecting yourself from criminals, the vast majority of them are idiots.

Re:Protection from what?

[Lord Lemur]

Well it only takes a few clicks to transfer that 525 Megadollars if you can get him to cough up the key.

Re:Protection from what?

[Anonymous Coward]

They will find you, unless they think you're already dead.

Re:Protection from what?

[jeffmflanagan]

>Of course, I'd expect it to be encrypted, but there are probably idiots out there who think they could simply walk in and take his bitcoins.

Since they'd have access to the person with the encryption keys, they wouldn't need much more than a pair of pliers to extract that key from Nakamoto, so I'd say they're pretty much right about being able to walk in and take his bitcoins. He should be VERY concerned about being outed.

Re:Protection from what?

[DdJ]

It's like, imagine you're a bank robber and you've got two banks in town. One is an old-school bank that has thwarted dozens of bank robbers in the past and routinely. They hire people specifically to worry about bank robbers. On the other side of town, there's this new hip young bank that's getting money thrown at them like mad. They used to just take all the money home with them at the end of the night, but now they've got this new "cold storage" place to put money they're not using at the moment. They're known to be idiotic fools, everything thinks the whole thing is a fly-by-night operation, and they don't even have a safe.

You intended this to be a metaphor for attacking traditional financial institutions versus attacking Bitcoin exchanges, right?

(It certainly works as a metaphor for that.)

Re:Protection from what?

[Anonymous Coward]

So he only has $100 million? Fucking pauper.

Re:Protection from what?

[ceoyoyo]

The guy is described as a crypto expert and someone who's worked on classified projects. It's not likely that hard drive is in his home somewhere. It's probably in a safe deposit box. Or two.

Smart people know about pliers.

Re:Protection from what?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Protection from what? Bitcoin is not that big of a deal and I cannot conceive of a reason why anyone would care if he invented it or not other than idle curiosity.

Because [the "real" Satoshi Nakomoto] is known to have about $400M worth of bitcoin, which criminals erroneously think is untraceable.

I very deeply hope that none of the people this man cares about are threatened (or worse) because of this Newsweek story. If Newsweek is wrong but some kidnappers get the wrong idea anyway, then they're doubly screwed.

I can't think of who benefits from this story aside from the author and Newsweek. Before anybody says that he might get some job offers, none of us can presume to know better for him than what he knows to be best for him.

Re:Protection from what?

[bill_mcgonigle]

It's not likely that hard drive is in his home somewhere. It's probably in a safe deposit box

At this point, it's far easier to get a warrant to empty a safe deposit box than it is to search a home. Banking privacy was eliminated by the Patriot Act.

Re:Protection from what?

[HeckRuler]

Well, I was going specifically for mtgox.

Seriously, it's "Magic the Gather: Online eXchange." Anyone that was fooled by the rebranding to Mt.Gox deserves to have their money taken.

The other exchanges are hopefully more legit.

Re:Protection from what?

[FlyHelicopters]

He lives with his mother... You don't have to hurt him, you only have to hurt her...

Ask yourself, would you trade your mother's life for any amount of money? I know I wouldn't...

Re:Protection from what?

[bill_mcgonigle]

If he attempted to get cash for 5% of his holdings, the market price would likely crash

Yeah, but none of the drug gangs demand $10M for a ransom payment. The real SN could get $200K easily enough.

Besides, his keys are more valuable than his cash, to the most violent gangs on the planet.

Re:Protection from what?

[Idimmu Xul]

Dude there are Mclaren MP4s for sale for Bitcoins, people are buying land and mansions with them, you can get takeaways delivered, bars and restaurants accept them, other than gas/water/electric youre basically set. Converting $500M bitcoin to cash is MASSIVELY short sighted.

You could just take them and probably live off them in an extremely luxurious lifestyle, or at the same time you could sell 1 or 2 a day which wouldnt move the market at all giving you both an awesome life style and cold hard cash.

Re:Protection from what?

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's why neither of us are filthy rich, because we won't do whatever it takes.

Re:Protection from what?

[ceoyoyo]

Random thieves have difficulty getting warrants. If he wants to avoid theft and torture at the hands of the US government he would clearly have to move to another country.

Re:Protection from what?

[mysidia]

Besides, his keys are more valuable than his cash, to the most violent gangs on the planet.

Is that because of the covert backdoor in the protocol, that grants the private key of the address in the genesis block double spending privileges, and the ability to nuke the blockchain?

Re:Protection from what?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Agreed, but SN is unlikely to give up his key passwords without torture, so the random thieves aren't really so much of a risk.

I can't see how he can get out of the country at this point. It's logical to assume that the things he'd need to reconstruct his keys are not in the same jurisdiction as he is.

Re:Protection from what?

[Anonymous Coward]

He holds and estimated 800,000 BTC, assuming he is Satoshi. That's $525 600 000.00 Reason enough?

Virtual money, though, because it can't be cashed in.

Re:Protection from what?

[Anonymous Coward]

But the blockchain is public, and if any bitcoin moved from Nakomoto's address, you can bet the entire community will be scrutinising where it goes extremely closely.

Model Trains?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wanna know more about his trains-- does he have a cool layout?

Re:Model Trains?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I wanna know more about his trains-- does he have a cool layout?

It's pretty spartan, hey got caught up in the trains themselves. Each set of cars is arranged in a very specific sequence that he really gets worked up about, and I've noticed that it takes him longer and longer every time to decide on and add a new car to the end of the train....

Re:Model Trains?

[CronoCloud]

So autistic spectrum then?

Re:Model Trains?

[Anonymous Coward]

See here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1AMGtFmsX0

Re:Model Trains?

[Anonymous Coward]

That wooshing sound is not the train at the end of the tunnel. (It was a joke. Laugh.)

Re:Model Trains?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am more curious about if he will be adequately recognized and compensated for finding a workable solution to The Byzantine Generals Problem.

Might have something to do with other things

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC he was sitting on a bunch of bitcoins. So he could be worth a lot of money if he cashed out. Someone could potentially cause him or his loved ones harm because of that perceived wealth, whether it's real or not.

"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[unimacs]

So somebody is in charge of Bitcoin? What do they do?

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are teams that update the main software implementation(s). I guess that's what he means.

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

What do they do?

They do what the Bitcoin Protocol was always intended to do: create and maintain the world's largest SHA256 Rainbow Table.

You didn't think this was all about about creating a decentralized crypto-currency did you?

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

They steal bitcoins

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

So somebody is in charge of Bitcoin? What do they do?

Write and maintain bitcoin-protocol compatible clients, care for and feed mining hardware, provide the bandwidth for continued distribution of the block chain, and (maybe) actually use bitcoins for something so that they aren't just a pile of uninteresting solutions to difficult-but-totally-banal math problems?

There is no specific Bitcoin Commissar; but (not unlike most OSS projects, wholly aside from your view of the... exciting financial infrastructure that exists between bitcoin and the broader world) only software projects that are either 100% dead, or so perfect that no coder since the Heroic Age has felt worthy enough to soil them with his changes, work without some sort of team, often fairly heavily skewed toward a few core people with a (sometimes more helpful, sometimes mostly passive) cloud of peripheral users and smalltime contributors. Whatever else it may be, it is a software project, a peer to peer network, and a distributed computation setup, all of which don't exactly keep themselves running. He, presumably, is no longer interested in dealing with any of that.

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[psionski]

Write code, fix bugs, create promotional material and documentation. It's a software project, what else would they be doing?

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

In my monthly tin foil moments I had considered that same idea. What if bitcoin was just some way to crack something. What if there is some message out there that is encrypted and someone wanted to crack it. This would be a seriously awesome way to get someone else to gen up the tables for you.

I dont play with it much other than read the occasional headline. What *exactly* is the bitcoin alg doing? We know it is 'work' and produces a credit of a 'coin'. But what does it do? What is it encoding/decoding?

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[alostpacket]

But what does it do? What is it encoding/decoding?

"Be sure to drink your Ovaltine"

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are the new top of the pyramid scheme that is bitcoin

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[grnbrg]

It's not encoding anything. Miners are basically doing sha256( sha256( block header info + random number )) until the result has (currently) about 15 leading zeros.

There is no room in the protocol to do anything else, or solve some sort of background problem.

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

A crummy commercial! Son of a bitch!

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[gorzek]

I assume you're asking how the "mining" works, and that's actually pretty easy to explain.

Each bitcoin block is generated with a SHA256 hash of the block's header. Presumably, the header information is not guessable, otherwise it would be pointless.

The SHA256 hash becomes the "target." In order to successfully mine the block, you must produce a hash with a value lower than the target. The lower the target, the harder it is to mine the block. Since SHA256 hashes (as far as I know) do not leak any information about the plaintext, the hashes are attempted essentially at random. Successfully mining a block is essentially like winning the lottery because there is no known way to make educated guesses about what text might produce a hash below the target's value.

Once an acceptable hash has been generated by a miner, it is submitted to the network with a proof of work that permits the rest of the network to essentially check the solution. At that point, the block is considered completed, the transactions are processed, and the successful miner is awarded the transaction fees plus 20 new BTC.

I don't think the rainbow table comparison is apt because you're not attempting to produce hash collisions, only find hashes below a set value. Finding a collision is exponentially more difficult, by design.

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[MickyTheIdiot]

Typical anti-Bitcoin bullshit.

Wikipedia: A pyramid scheme is an unsustainable business model that involves promising participants payment or services, primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme, rather than supplying any real investment or sale of products or services to the public.

1) Where is the "promise" of payment or services that never gets fulfilled? Find a block and you get paid (in Bitcoin, sorry... a claim that Bitcoin isn't "real" doesn't hold water here).
2) Where is the "enrollment" of other people in the scheme. I mine, I've never recruited anyone into a "scheme".
3) Bitcoins have value. As a group people have assigned value to them. The fact I can go to an exchange and get money based on a bitcoin proves that. Just because the product is digital doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

If you think it's a scam I can respect that, but write something that says why you think it is a scam. Don't come out and yell buzzwords like '"pyramid scheme" and "ponzi scheme" without justifying how it fits in to the accepted definition of the term.

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[AmiMoJo]

He means developers. He doesn't contribute to development of code in any way any more. Implementation flaws in the cryptography are someone else's problem.

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a question I have about that. The target must have x number of leading zeros. What if I mined a block that had way more zeros? Do I use it as a solution to the current "easier" target or do I keep that block hidden away for when the block-chain gets harder to solve?

I'm guessing that the correct answer is to use it right away so nobody else can. But what happens to remaining unsolved solutions when they make the mining more difficult?

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[davek]

Close, but not quite.

I assume you're asking how the "mining" works, and that's actually pretty easy to explain.

Each bitcoin block is generated with a SHA256 hash of the block's header. Presumably, the header information is not guessable, otherwise it would be pointless.

The SHA256 hash becomes the "target." In order to successfully mine the block, you must produce a hash with a value lower than the target. The lower the target, the harder it is to mine the block.

The "target" is in fact the difficulty. Essentially a difficulty of 1 means an applicable proof-of-work block solution would be less than 2^256 >> 1 (I could be wrong on the max size, I'd have to look it up). A block "solution" is a sha-256 hash of (merkle root (which is generated by doing a merkle tree starting with the transaction IDs of all the transactions since the last block) + some other header stuff + a nonce). The header stuff is completely public and known. The "work" miners to is generate trillions upon trillions of those nonces (which is just a word for a random piece of data), calculate the sha-256, and see if the resulting sha is less than the target.

Successfully mining a block is essentially like winning the lottery because there is no known way to make educated guesses about what text might produce a hash below the target's value.

Once an acceptable hash has been generated by a miner, it is submitted to the network with a proof of work that permits the rest of the network to essentially check the solution. At that point, the block is considered completed, the transactions are processed, and the successful miner is awarded the transaction fees plus 20 new BTC.

It's fees + 25 BTC. But that will change eventually, as we approach the max of 22 million BTC in circulation.

I don't think the rainbow table comparison is apt because you're not attempting to produce hash collisions, only find hashes below a set value. Finding a collision is exponentially more difficult, by design.

A "rainbow table" in this case would have to have a number of entries greater than the size of particles in the known universe, I think. We're talking about stupidly large numbers here.

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[UnknownSoldier]

Honest Q. Where do you get that conclusion from?

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[gorzek]

I think the issue is that storing all of those potential solutions "just in case" is space-prohibitive. To store every single possible SHA256 hash, you would need ~3.2*10^60 exabytes. Totally outrageous amount of space, right? And that's not even counting the proof of work, which also needs to be stored. The issue isn't knowing the hashes themselves, it's having the proof of work to demonstrate how you found them, and that's the part that takes enormous amounts of computation to produce (but is extremely easy to verify by the network once it's done.)

It's possible some people do store the very low results in order to solve high-difficulty (low-target) blocks on down the line, but I'm under the impression that producing such a hash occurs so rarely that no one would be able to effectively hoard them. Maybe you produce one and keep it and you can use it 3 blocks from now, but then you don't have another for 100 more blocks. (Numbers pulled out of my ass, you get the idea.) Generally, you always want to solve the block you can now, because even if the solution you found may be usable on a future block, you just gave up the current block to someone else, and the blocks that have 20 BTC payouts have a finite supply.

I should point out that the network automatically adjusts the difficulty every 2016 blocks (roughly every two weeks) based on average block solve time, so if somebody hoarded a bunch of low-value hashes and proofs and then dumped them all at once, it would very likely make the next round much harder because the network would deliberately make it more difficult.

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[gorzek]

Thanks for the clarifications and corrections! :)

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

"the hashes are attempted essentially at random"

You hash the data + a random number. Solution doesn't satisfy the required output value? Try another random number until it does.

Once you've found a "correct" random number anyone can easily verify your result by hashing the same data and number.

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

It pretty much falls right out when you add Bitcoin to the Illuminati + Lizard People + New World Order + Federal Reserve + Zionist Cabal + Skull and Bones + 9/11 Truth + Area 51 + Bigfoot equation, doesn't it?

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Social security, on the other hand....

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

who creates the hash that everyone else is looking for? or is that the sum of transaction + headers + nonce which has to result in some specific form in the hash? why does it get harder?

how is the 20btc reward "given" ?

Re:"It's been turned over to other people" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

They maintain the main implementation of the protocol called the BitcoinQt client. They are not "in charge" in the sense that anyone has to do what they say, it's just that most people use this implementation or some derivative of it (for instance, the Dogecoin client is a fork of the BitcoinQt client) to do their bitcoining. Though anyone is free to code their own version as long as other nodes will accept your blocks and transactions.

whoever you are Mr. Sakamoto,

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you.

The collapse of Mt Gox proves that nothing you have done has changed how conniving and rotten some people are.

The continued use of Bitcoin and its expanding acceptance for exchanging value for goods proves you put a dent in the equally conniving and rotten world of conventional banking.

Re: whoever you are Mr. Sakamoto,

[Anonymous Coward]

Conventional banking will take it over if it gets much bigger, because the banks control politics. So politics will step in to "regulate" the currency, or they will outlaw it altogether. Funny he develops stuff for government, curious!

Re: whoever you are Mr. Sakamoto,

[Lisias]

Funny he develops stuff for government, curious!

[ConspirationMode:ON]

You see, perhaps he's working *with* the government to erode the banking system influence on politics.

Create an enemy to control your allies.

limit?

[invictusvoyd]

The link says

You have reached the limit of 5 free articles a month

zzzz

Re:limit?

[SpankiMonki]

I got that too. When I temporarily turned off NoScript for the site and clicked on the "Newsweek" graphic at the top, the article was then displayed.

Breaking big in Finland

[Anonymous Coward]

There's this fun little piece in the article:

One of the first people to start working with Bitcoin's founder in 2009 was Martti Malmi, 25, a Helsinki programmer who invested in Bitcoins. "I sold them in 2011 and bought a nice apartment," he says. "Today, I could have bought 100 nice apartments."

because devils

[swschrad]

all the silk road gang who never got their stash or their BiteCon back are going to think he's hiding their BiteCon under the pile of unicorn crap in the living room.

dude.

Outed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is he gay or bisexual or something?

Re:Outed?

[DoctorBit]

OP here - the submitted headline used the verb "doxed" rather than "outed". On a separate note, r/bitcoin has been raising some interesting doubts about the correctness of the article: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoi...

Re:Outed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Reddit = idiots
Reddit bitcoin = extraordinary idiots

Re:Outed?

[Anonymous Coward]

If r/bitcoin is ever correct about anything, it is entirely on accident. It's only slightly better than the BTY-e trollbox.

Because

[Anonymous Coward]

He allegedly holds up to 1 Million BTC.

if you drive a toyota corolla that doesn't automat

[Anonymous Coward]

I have already read two articles that highlight the fact that this guy drives a Toyota Corolla even though he is worth $400mil. Why is this a thing with the geeks in Silicon Valley.
- Also, if he went to a state college and now calls himself a libertarian, I have to call that out. That is also a "Silicon Valley" thing.
- It's really getting old. We have beaten this stereotype to death, so can we just move on PLEASE.

move and hire round-the-clock security

[Oligonicella]

He fears for his life, eh? And you know this how, because of your telepathy or your in-depth personal interview with him? Personally, I imagine that it's because of your own paranoia leaking into all aspects of life. See how easy it is to fabricate a crap opinion from nothing.

Re:move and hire round-the-clock security

[Anonymous Coward]

For one, he called the cops when the reporter showed up at his door. Then he said that he believes he's going to be in trouble if he talks to her. It's also quite natural to be somewhat paranoid if one sits on 400 million USD.

Re:move and hire round-the-clock security

[canadiannomad]

if one sits on 400 million USD

Which could double or half tomorrow.... The benefits and drawbacks of bitcoin...

Re:move and hire round-the-clock security

[DaveV1.0]

Of course, he could just be crazy.

Re:move and hire round-the-clock security

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that he's accomplished far more than you ever will, let's give him the benefit of the doubt.

Setec Astronomy

[wiredog]

It was only while scouring a database that contained the registration cards of naturalized U.S. citizens that a Satoshi Nakamoto turned up whose profile and background offered a potential match. But it was not until after ordering his records from the National Archives

Guess the Privacy Act doesn't apply to individuals.

Re:Setec Astronomy

[Anonymous Coward]

That's journalism!
So what if they're a bunch of asses with the power to ruin lives for a few dollars? It's perfectly legal AND they have laws that protect them, meaning it's also perfectly ethical.
They're not going extinct fast enough ...

Re:Setec Astronomy

[bytestorm]

Late readers will note that the paragraph wiredog is quoting has been completely removed from the original Newsweek source, but it appears in quotation by other articles, for example, this washington post blog article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

The original paragraph was as parent quoted:

It was only while scouring a database that contained the registration cards of naturalized U.S. citizens that a Satoshi Nakamoto turned up whose profile and background offered a potential match. But it was not until after ordering his records from the National Archives and conducting many more interviews that a cohesive picture began to take shape.

The idea that anybody can search databases of federal government-curated vital records for a specific profile to identify any given person without proof of relationship or a court order is more than a little horrifying.

Re:Setec Astronomy

[bytestorm]

Sorry, this is the full paragraph:

There are several Satoshi Nakamotos living in North America and beyond - both dead and alive - including a Ralph Lauren menswear designer in New York and another who died in Honolulu in 2008, according to the Social Security Index's Death Master File. There's even one on LinkedIn who claims to have started Bitcoin and is based in Japan. But none of these profiles seem to fit other known details and few of the leads proved credible. Of course, there is also the chance "Satoshi Nakamoto" is a pseudonym, but that raises the question why someone who wishes to remain anonymous would choose such a distinctive name. It was only while scouring a database that contained the registration cards of naturalized U.S. citizens that a Satoshi Nakamoto turned up whose profile and background offered a potential match. But it was not until after ordering his records from the National Archives and conducting many more interviews that a cohesive picture began to take shape.

Here is an archive link to the article as originally printed: http://archive.is/wbw97

Gun + BC client = $1,000,000,000

[Idou]

Other billionaires require some kind of impossibly complicated strategy to steal their billions. . .

Hope he takes the necessary precautions, though. . . Crypto-currencies are awesome. He deserves to spend the rest of his days in peace (For a crypto-genius, he could have picked a better pseudonym, though . . .).

Re:Gun + BC client = $1,000,000,000

[geekoid]

" Crypto-currencies are awesome."
No, not really. I mean, it's a neat idea, but there is no long term inherent stability in hiding money behind math.

http://gizmodo.com/the-quantum...

http://www.techspot.com/news/5...

Re:Gun + BC client = $1,000,000,000

[Idou]

Two things:
-Crypto-currencies can still be awesome without "long term inherent stability" (are you sure you are a "geek?")
-You do realize that math covers everything in our universe and BEYOND. Accordingly, I would be careful about what constraints you put on it. . . as it is statistically more likely that your mind is just creating artificial constraints.

Irregardless, thanks for the links.

Re:Gun + BC client = $1,000,000,000

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Crypto-currencies can still be many things without "long term inherent stability", except for currency of course.

Re:Gun + BC client = $1,000,000,000

[CreatureComfort]

Yeah, cause that pile of Deutschmark dad buried in our back yard was such a great idea. Lasted all of 54 years as a currency with "inherent stability". At least they will still take them in exchange for Euro "indefinitely", or until they change their minds.

Inherent stability, long term or not, is NOT a requirement for a currency to be useful. Just ask Argentina, Zimbabwe, heck, even China has to manipulate the hell out of the world markets to keep their currency "stable". All of those, and really EVERY currency that isn't the current "Reserve Currency" is still valuable to people making exchanges with it every day for food, shelter, work, etc. Maybe not AS valuable as the reserve currency in the world market, or in the home country of that currency, but still useful as a measure of portable, convertible value.

Re:Gun + BC client = $1,000,000,000

[Idou]

Alright, perhaps we need to inform all these countries that they do, in fact, not have currencies . . .

An unstable currency is still a currency (Just because a "thing" has some attribute does not mean we have to create an entirely new "noun." That is why the English language has "adjectives.").

Re:Gun + BC client = $1,000,000,000

[Mr. Slippery]

You do realize that math covers everything in our universe and BEYOND. Accordingly, I would be careful about what constraints you put on it. . . as it is statistically more likely that your mind is just creating artificial constraints.

Ah, the irony.

Math is a creation of the human mind, and by its nature can never go beyond the limits of human ability to understand. The universe, on the other hand, is not bound by the limitations of the nervous systems of a group of balding apes, and I have to agree with J. B. S. Haldane's suspicion that "the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

Re:Gun + BC client = $1,000,000,000

[chfriley]

Ask the USA too. "Long term stability" and "dollar" do not go together for many decades now.

Re:Gun + BC client = $1,000,000,000

[egcagrac0]

Currency doesn't need to be a long term value store; currency needs to be a vehicle for short term value exchange.

Re:Gun + BC client = $1,000,000,000

[MickyTheIdiot]

Places like Istanbul, Turkey always quote people prices in USD. This doesn't mean their "unstable" currency is worthless, it's just their workaround. Same thing happens with Bitcoin.

Re:Gun + BC client = $1,000,000,000

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you need to turn in your geek card.

Awesomeness and practicality are usually mutually exclusive.

For example, encoding your data mining algorithms into Conway's Game of Life and implementing it in Dwarf Fortress is 'awesome' (you've got a dwarvin data mine). But it's also horribly impractical.

Similarly crypto currencies are pretty neat, but also not all that practical (they don't usually solve a real problem).

Re:Gun + BC client = $1,000,000,000

[DaveV1.0]

Really? Can you explain why the U.S. dollar is the preferred currency in many nations including enemies of the U.S.? Can you name one country where one can't exchange dollars for the local currency? Can you name one instance in the last 50 years where Americans had to be paid twice a day in cash and then spend the money immediately so the value wouldn't decrease?

That word you use, I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:Gun + BC client = $1,000,000,000

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, man, you just don't follow the logic. Any internet libertarian can tell you that the USD is going to collapse -- therefore Bitcoin is the superior alternative.

Re:Gun + BC client = $1,000,000,000

[Donwulff]

Two REAL things: 1) The D-Wave computers are not true quantum computers and can't be used for that, and so far it's not even been shown D-Wave quantum computers exhibit quantum nature at all, and 2) Even a true quantum computer would simply make the hashing faster, which in turn would lead the Bitcoin network to adjust its difficulty higher, for no net gain.
There are numerous reasons to criticize Bitcoins, but "Think about the D-Wave quantum computers!" is NOT one of them. Actually ASIC-miners are lot more realistic and imminent threat that has already materialized, leading their owners to adopting measures and treaties to try to convince Bitcoin community they would not take advantage of it - they're the ones with most to lose, after all.

Re:Gun + BC client = $1,000,000,000

[Anonymous Coward]

"You do realize that math covers everything in our universe and BEYOND"

What makes you BELIEVE that?

Re:Gun + BC client = $1,000,000,000

[Idou]

Two things:

- Everytime we thought that a diety was responsible for something in our universe, we have been able create a mathematical model to replace that diety (e.g. Atlas).
- People can think of tons of crazy math that has no application to our universe.

Re:Gun + BC client = $1,000,000,000

[Idou]

Math is a creation of the human mind

Are you sure? That sounds a bit geocentric to me . . .

Re:Gun + BC client = $1,000,000,000

[Anonymous Coward]

"math covers everything in our universe and BEYOND"

It's not often we get reports back from beyond the universe. Thanks for the update. How can we ever hope to solve important problems when people don't even understand that the universe is bigger than the universe?

Re:if you drive a toyota corolla that doesn't auto

[TheCarp]

> - Also, if he went to a state college and now calls himself a libertarian, I have to call that out.
> That is also a "Silicon Valley" thing.

so a person who uses any state resources which they and their parents before them paid for....this should limit what opinions they are allowed to form later?

I was raised catholic and took first communion, and later came to realize the whole God thing was a sham, am I stuck being Catholic?

Seems like a raw deal to me.

So how many BTC does he have?

[Marrow]

I wonder if the loss of secrecy will affect the price?

Poor Guy

[Metabolife]

He just wanted to be left alone, leave him alone.

I reject your reality and substitute my own....

[FilmedInNoir]

This is Satoshi Nakamoto:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9rqm...

and his friend. They create crypto-currencies and attend raves.

Re:I reject your reality and substitute my own....

[wonkey_monkey]

I'm Satoshi Nakamoto, and so's my wife!

Re:I reject your reality and substitute my own....

[MickyTheIdiot]

Fuck.. Satoshi Nakamoto is Prince of Space?

Re:I reject your reality and substitute my own....

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Razor and Blade!! They're elite!

Re:if you drive a toyota corolla that doesn't auto

[Anonymous Coward]

I was raised catholic and took first communion, and later came to realize the whole God thing was a sham, am I stuck being Catholic?

Naw, you're just stuck with the guilt.

How do you disable audio ads on /.

[xednieht]

Why the FUUUUUUCK does audio randomly start playing on ads on /. who is the fucking imbecile that thought it would be a good idea to annoy the FUCK out of people. Fuck you moron, Fuck you moron, FUCK YOU MORON! Yes i'm mad bro.

Re:How do you disable audio ads on /.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the FUUUUUUCK does audio randomly start playing on ads on /.

who is the fucking imbecile that thought it would be a good idea to annoy the FUCK out of people.

Fuck you moron, Fuck you moron, FUCK YOU MORON!

Yes i'm mad bro.

adblock.. it's been around for a long time.

There are ads on /. ???
There are ads on the internet?

Re:How do you disable audio ads on /.

[Meneth]

You are also not using AdBlock. :}

Re:How do you disable audio ads on /.

[medv4380]

You could always, idk, just check that disable ads box, or get ad-block. Personally I just have flash disabled. Few if any ads utilize html5 to spit out audio, and I hate noise tabs.

Re:How do you disable audio ads on /.

[tazan]

Yes, I got woke up at 6am this morning with a repeating swiffer comercial. I know what the solution is though, and am about to implement it. On a windows machine go to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc edit the host file and add this line to the bottom.

127.0.0.1 slashdot.org

This should improve my general productivity as well.

Re:How do you disable audio ads on /.

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people like to contribute something to a site they visit frequently. For some, it is giving ad views. I had AdBlock disabled for this site for quite a while, however, I turned it back on when I first saw the beta.

Re:How do you disable audio ads on /.

[Anonymous Coward]

AdBlock? That's for pussies. Real men firewall the ad servers.

Re:How do you disable audio ads on /.

[Nyder]

Some people like to contribute something to a site they visit frequently. For some, it is giving ad views. I had AdBlock disabled for this site for quite a while, however, I turned it back on when I first saw the beta.

If you don't click on those ads, having AdBlock disabled doesn't do shit to help the site.

Bull fucking shit

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of bullshit article is this? Wtf has happened to slash dot that they link such utter horseshit stories now? Nice that the article tries to link crazy or borderline criminal behavior with screening phone calls or being secretive. Hey why not just say that anyone that does hail the enlighten political machine should be exiled to a camp in the northern reaches of Alaska? People need to call shit like this what it is from the get go and blast whoever would write such crap.

FIRST!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

first!!!!!

Years to develop the software?

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha, as a cryptographer for longer than this guy I can tell you that bitcoin probably took 6 months or less to complete in his spare time, including planning and design. Although he probably had the idea in his head for much longer.

Like so many things that were not that difficult (Facebook, Minecraft, etc) all it took was for someone with a good idea, some luck, and at least a basic skillset to actually do it. The public sees it as some sort of genius though, lol. Maybe that's what genius is.

Re: if you drive a toyota corolla that doesn't aut

[Anonymous Coward]

It's because it's pr pieces for Toyota. That's the only reason to state the exact model. Did they even give a year of the car? Most times no, and that's pretty much a sign that it is an ad placed in a story to get the words "Toyota corolla" out there

Fair Play

[Anonymous Coward]

If this is true I think this is very irresponsible. She posts the photo, house photo, legal name, and more information of someone that wants to be anonymous. Not to mention how dangerous this would be if true. I imagine many people would do terrible things to get his private keys.

Myself and several others have sent emails to the author of this report.

Leah McGrath Goodman

http://www.newsweek.com/authors/leah-mcgrath-goodman

http://leahmcgrathgoodman.com/

l.goodman@newsweek.com

lmcgrathgoodman@gmail.com

http://twitter.com/truth_eater

What impresses & baffles me

[RogueWarrior65]

What I find impressive and baffling is how people assign value to things that have no value for any purpose other than a means of exchange. It does require a certain amount of herd mentality because if I went into the woods, cut up sticks into specific lengths, and tried to pay for my next meal with it, they'd call the men in the white coats. Or perhaps more accurately, if I typed in a bunch of random numbers and tried to pay my cable bill with it. Sure, Bitcoin's value is lack of government involvement but beyond that it has no equivalent value. It's not like physical gold or silver which can be used to make things or oil which is energy.

Re:What impresses & baffles me

[oodaloop]

What I find impressive and baffling is how people assign value to things that have no value for any purpose other than a means of exchange

I thought you were going to make some pithy remark that the U.S. dollar is little different from Bitcoin in that regard, but perhaps you haven't realizede that yet.

Re:What impresses & baffles me

[Connie_Lingus]

the us dollar is backed by "the full faith and credit of the us government"

which means its' ability to confiscate wealth and land and use it to secure its notes, using various federal agencies.

also, to use its' formidable military to battle and perhaps even conquer foreign countries to access resources.

and bitcoin has.....hmmm a distributed blockchain loaded with encrypted data.

yeah...sure the dollar and bitcoin are almost identical.

Re:What impresses & baffles me

[Dragonslicer]

What I find impressive and baffling is how people assign value to things that have no value for any purpose other than a means of exchange.

What I find baffling is how many people grossly underestimate the value of a standard means of exchange.

Re:What impresses & baffles me

[geekoid]

common means for exchange IS value.

It's a lot easier then trying to trade sheep. And gold has it's own issue; hence we don't use it anymore.

"Bitcoin's value is lack of government involvement "
is it? I can't help but to think back to how horrible people where treated prior to banking regulations.
What do you do when a bank can just rake you money and you have no recourse?

Re:What impresses & baffles me

[geekoid]

That's not true at all.
The dollar has value. It has government backing, it has protection for consumers, it is globally recognized, and pretty stable.
That is more valuable then gold.

Re:What impresses & baffles me

[HeckRuler]

I'm even more baffled by the simple failure of logic.

The thing can be used as a means of exchange. I can exchange it for things. I value it by why I can exchange it for.
If I have 2 bitcoins, I can trade it for.. what? $1000?. I can trade that cash for decent laptop.
I value 2 bitcoins at "laptop".

You know... today. Who knows if bitcoin will fall apart by next year. A standard means of exchange is good. A stable means of exchange that doesn't have wild volatile swings is better. A stable means of exchange that isn't headed for the crapper because of massive douchebags devaluing it over the years would be ideal. It's a long road to get there.

Re:What impresses & baffles me

[Anonymous Coward]

"What I find impressive and baffling is how people assign value to things that have no value for any purpose other than a means of exchange"

What this means is that you find economics to be impressive and baffling.

Nothing has any value that people don't assign to it. Everything is just another means of exchange that represents human labor.

Re:What impresses & baffles me

[Dragonslicer]

You're absolutely right. I didn't mean to imply that BitCoin is any good as a standard means of exchange. My statement would be much better if I clarified that it should be a stable standard.

Re:What impresses & baffles me

[Anonymous Coward]

And it's still a shared fantasy. Which does work as long as everyone keeps believing.

Re:What impresses & baffles me

[theskipper]

Reminiscent of this humorous (and insightful) look at cash compared to bitcoin:

http://ledracapital.com/blog/2...

Re:What impresses & baffles me

[Anonymous Coward]

By this logic the only currencies that can have value are those with military might. Yet many countries have their own currency which has value.

Re:What impresses & baffles me

[Anonymous Coward]

What I find impressive and baffling is how people assign value to things that have no value for any purpose other than a means of exchange. It does require a certain amount of herd mentality because if I went into the woods, cut up sticks into specific lengths, and tried to pay for my next meal with it, they'd call the men in the white coats.

It's kind of funny that you chose that specific example. Because, you know, history.

Re:What impresses & baffles me

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not like physical gold or silver which can be used to make things...

But those things don't account for the entire price of gold. Even if you add up all the industrial demand for Monster (TM) gold-plated audio cables, grillz, dookie ropes and Goldschlager, it doesn't add up to the price of gold. People put value above and beyond it as a commodity and also value it because of a means of exchange and a store of value. So what's confusing about something going from $100 to $1300 vs. $0 to $700? In one case you have $1200 extra value above it's commodity value and the other is $700 extra value.

Re:What impresses & baffles me

[Anonymous Coward]

the fact that it has no substance yet provides a way to prove it exists is exactly what makes it valuable.

Think of the bitcoin as a currency which works across vast distances like oh.... space

what good is an ounce of gold if its on earth and I'm in orbit around Jupiter and I want to conduct a transaction?
you can completely transfer a bitcoin to someone from earth to someone in orbit around jupiter but you can't transfer an ounce of gold.. in a timely manner anyway.

Re:What impresses & baffles me

[Anonymous Coward]

The use of physical gold or silver for making things is almost completely irrelevant to their value in the marketplace. Arbitrarily and collectively deciding that bitcoins are worth something is not really that different from making the same decision about precious metals. Fiat currencies (like US dollars) are similarly arbitrary, but have one distinguishing feature: there's an entity (like the Federal Reserve) that can arbitrarily produce an unlimited quantity of the currency.

You're right, though, that something like oil (or food, or cars) is different in that it is valued for its use as itself, rather than as a currency.

Re:What impresses & baffles me

[Anonymous Coward]

the us dollar is backed by "the full faith and credit of the us government"

Bitcoin is backed by the SHA256 algorithm, something I trust far more than the US Government.

Re:What impresses & baffles me

[RogueWarrior65]

Not really. Sheep have value on their own as a source of wool, food, and more sheep. Gold still has usefulness as a metal, granted those uses are a bit less practical. A bitcoin has no use other than a medium of exchange. In that regard, it's not too much different than paper money. The real question is how do we decide what the conversion rate is for one person's labor and/or goods to another person's labor and/or goods. And doesn't that conversion eventually lead to inflation when someone decides that they don't have as much as their neighbor (regardless of how much they produce) and so they demand more for their labor and/or goods which inevitably leads to a cascade of people demanding more which ultimately leaves the first envious person in the same position they started at? So really, the only use bitcoins have is taking away the ability of whoever controls the creation of currency from creating more to give it away for purposes of manipulating other people.

But the other aspect of bitcoins is the mining of them. A lot of people mined bitcoins without paying for the energy needed to run the mining computers if they mined them at their day job. Technically, that's theft. Who ends up paying for the equipment and the energy? I'm not talking about people who set up solar panels to power equipment they bought themselves but people who use other people's equipment and energy to do it. That company needs to pay for that by potentially raising its prices or by laying off workers.

Re:What impresses & baffles me

[Nyder]

That's not true at all.
The dollar has value. It has government backing, it has protection for consumers, it is globally recognized, and pretty stable.
That is more valuable then gold.

That is more valuable then gold? No it's not.

When the US Government collapses, what is the value of the dollar then? Ya, nothing.

Gold's value doesn't drop when governments do.

Re:What impresses & baffles me

[Anonymous Coward]

I am very happy about having hands to hand over cash with (or perform the occasional hand-job when im low on cash but need my crackock)

Re:What impresses & baffles me

[oodaloop]

And the Kronar is backed by the full faith of the Icelandic government. And it's utterly worthless. There are plenty more currencies backed by their governments around the world that are similarly worthless and abandoned by its citizens whenever possible. And some of those countries have a military too, before you ask. The Euro is doing quite well against the dollar, and there is no military behind it. The collective trust in a currency is far more important than the government that is backing it.

Pretend?

[medv4380]

I'm not sure if this is actually the guy, but conspiracy theories will fly about it forever so I don't care if he is or isn't. However playing 'Pretend the government agencies are coming after you.' with a child is enough for me to dismiss the guy as crazy.

Re:Pretend?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do you get that? It says that he told his daughter to start a business and become self reliant so she wouldn't depend on the government, not teach her to shoot down police helicopters.

Re:Pretend?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure if this is actually the guy, but conspiracy theories will fly about it forever so I don't care if he is or isn't. However playing 'Pretend the government agencies are coming after you.' with a child is enough for me to dismiss the guy as crazy.

Exactly. It's not like we'd ever put Japanese-Americans in concentration camps or anything.

Grigory Perelman

[benjfowler]

Similar personality types?

Re:Grigory Perelman

[spiritplumber]

And now I want to play AMFV again.

Re:Grigory Perelman

[Anonymous Coward]

yep

ahh

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been playing with this exact train of thought.
Cui bono? A large organization that always seems to need more raw computing power. *cough nsa cough*

Not sure if there is any way to possibly verify this.

Re:ahh

[Anonymous Coward]

> Not sure if there is any way to possibly verify this.

I dunno, teach yourself a bit of cryptography and read the fine paper, may be?

Re:ahh

[Anonymous Coward]

One does so enjoy a good conspiracy theory. So, unless you wrote your own client from the published paper, how do you really know what the Bitcoin client is doing? It's a persistent peer-to-peer network that spends its time calculating SHA-256 hashes. Sounds like it ought to be pretty straight-forward to turn that into a rainbow table.

Bunch of nonsense

[sjbe]

He holds and estimated 800,000 BTC, assuming he is Satoshi. That's $525 600 000.00 Reason enough?

First, if he has that much and hasn't liquidated a big portion of it then he is an idiot. 800K bitcoins are a good approximation of worthless as bitcoins and only a fool wouldn't diversify. Second, if he actually did try to sell that many he'd crash the market so there is absolutely no way in hell they are worth that much money in dollars. When you hold huge amounts of some asset you move the market when you try to sell. Flood the market with that much supply and the price will plummet.

The article is probably wrong

[alihm]

I don't beleive he is Satoshi. Dorian Nakamoto has three amazon reviews. His english is not good. http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/p...

Re:render onto...... never ends

[Anonymous Coward]

dark matters series top 1000 vdos i wish i'd never seen on youtube #1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Well, thanks for the warning. [/me doesn't click link]

Why is this Article Beign Taken Seriously?

[Stormy Dragon]

There's no actual concrete evidence of any of the author's claims, just tons of speculation. Yet it's being treated like it's undeniably true.

Re:Why is this Article Beign Taken Seriously?

[jones_supa]

Most news articles do not have concrete evidence included.

Szabo?

[Capt.Albatross]

I thought the evidence previously presented, that Nicholas Szabo was Satoshi, was plausible, albeit circumstantial. I suspect that this Satoshi Nakamato's involvement with Bitcoin was not as the primary innovator or leader, while the the person(s) who did play those roles prefer for Newsweek (and the rest of the world) to think otherwise.
     

Re:Hah!

[joaommp]

You all have your pound of flesh, just leave the man alone!

Obvious Hoax

[Martin S.]

Newsweek : This man is Satoshi Nakamoto.

Sheriff : "What?" The police officer balks.
Sheriff : "This is the guy who created Bitcoin?

Are we really supposed to believe that a Police Officer would know such geek trivia?

Seems to be a little overly dramatic.

Re:Obvious Hoax

[BasilBrush]

Are we really supposed to believe that a Police Officer would know such geek trivia?

I have a friend who takes no interest in geek stuff, but he raised the topic with me last time I saw him. The Mt Gox incident made the national news. So yes, it's perfectly feasible a police officer had heard of them.

Re:Obvious Hoax

[barlevg]

THIS! I work in an office filled with programmers, research scientists and software devs--when I told them Satoshi Nakamoto's true identity was revealed, they all said, "who?"

Re:Obvious Hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we really supposed to believe that a Police Officer would know such geek trivia?

Stereotype much? Some police officers are geeks.

Re:Obvious Hoax

[Anonymous Psychopath]

Newsweek : This man is Satoshi Nakamoto.

Sheriff : "What?" The police officer balks.
Sheriff : "This is the guy who created Bitcoin?

Are we really supposed to believe that a Police Officer would know such geek trivia?

Seems to be a little overly dramatic.

You intentionally cut off the quote. "I would like to ask him about Bitcoin. This man is Satoshi Nakamoto." And plenty of cops are geeks, probably around the same as any other job. I used to have a bunch of them show up the LAN parties we'd do in the early 2000's.

Re:Obvious Hoax

[Martin S.]

That I did, because I was mainly shooting for funny.

However even taking that into account we are expected to believe the officer made the leap for 'about' to 'inventing'.

If we apply Occam's razor to the question; which is mostly likely, the officer being well informed on such esoteric matters or overly dramatic journalism.

I'm left wonder how much of the rest of the evidence is embellished.

Consider the subjects obsessional secrecy, bordering on paranoia, why would he publish the paper using his own name!

Re:Obvious Hoax

[jones_supa]

Are we really supposed to believe that a Police Officer would know such geek trivia?

I have seen Bitcoin mentioned multiple times in mainstream news, so it's not completely impossible for people to have heard about Satoshi.

Re:Obvious Hoax

[DaveV1.0]

You mistake an interest in tech and science with an interest in BitCoins.

Re:Obvious Hoax

[Stormy Dragon]

Are we really supposed to believe that a Police Officer would know such geek trivia?

Not just knows it; he responds with a useful line of expository dialogue, like a character in some lousy fan fiction.

Re:Obvious Hoax

[barlevg]

The two are heavily correlated. I'd expect a much greater percentage of programmers to know about bitcoins than I would local law enforcement. Then again, if Bitcoins are actively being used for illegal transactions, I suppose it's plausible that the local popo are better informed than I might have thought (I still doubt they're being given history lessons on the currency...).

Re:Obvious Hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

Did your friend actually know the name of the creator of Bitcoin? I know Bitcoin has itself been in the news a bit, but usually they don't talk about who created it.

Online Anonymity

[RivenAleem]

That's a huge amount of stalking that went on right there. Serious invasion of privacy in that article. Quite disgusting and totally backs up his desire to be anonymous online.

007

[tepples]

If they thought that 'quiet, eccentric, mathematician brutally murdered in suspected cyber-revenge' would have an ROI greater than the legal exposure, they'd probably kill him themselves just to be first to the body...

I seem to remember seeing a movie about this sort of plot. Was it called Tomorrow Never Dies, by chance?

Probably the same as anyone

[Anonymous Coward]

With a massive amount of raw distributed processing power.

Re:Probably the same as anyone

[Anonymous Coward]

With a massive amount of raw distributed processing power.

My god, you're right! They're sequencing Velociraptor DNA.

which attracts more weirdos, trucking or bitcoin?

[raymorris]

The Jones family of northwest Arkansas is rich from their trucking company. They are well known amongst people who follow the trucking industry. How many unstable people are passionate about trucking compared to how many unstable people are passionate about bitcoin?

I'm not saying that everyone who uses bitcoin is unstable - most aren't. But of the people who are unstable, more will be iinterested in bitcoin, Marilyn Manson, and Ron Paul than in Walmart, Jewel Kilcher, and Marco Rubio.

He's just a patsy

[Patent Lover]

The real inventor was Keyser Soze.

I heard from a totally unreliable source . . .

[NicknamesAreStupid]

. . . that it was actually the K**h brothers who contracted with the Russian Mafia to invent Bitcoin, and they set Nakomoto up as the fall guy. I'm sure it is totally bogus, in spite of the salaciousness and viral rumor-mongering appeal. Has anyone got any completely unsubstantiated confirmation of this?

I wasn't aware this was unethical...

[sirwired]

I was not aware it was inherently considered unethical journalism to uncover those who wish to remain anonymous. Peeling back anonymity can help shed light on the reasons somebody does what they did. Background, motiviations, current involvement, etc. are certainly newsworthy things to examine.

And why is his life in danger?

Re:I wasn't aware this was unethical...

[Anonymous Coward]

> And why is his life in danger?

He has about $400 million in Bitcoins. Someone could kidnap him and then force him to reveal the private keys to his bitcoin addresses.

Re:I wasn't aware this was unethical...

[QuasiSteve]

I don't think it is unethical to uncover, but it may be unethical to reveal as much detail as has been revealed. But that depends on one's level of ethics.

Consider the ubiquitous example of a lottery winner. You win $100M, you probably do not want that plastered all over the internet, and choose to remain anonymous.

Some journalist figures out it's you anyway, and they want to just do an interview and ask you how you feel, how the $100M has changed your life, your relationships, etc.

The journalist then goes ahead and publishes that story, with proof that they found the winner (probably have the official notifications, etc.), the content of interview, but with identifying things removed.
There you go, the anonymous lottery winner has been proven to be uncovered, they get their article, and the reader gets their juicy little piece on what it's like to win a huge prize lottery.

That's one scenario. In the other scenario, you decline the interview, and before you come back you get some cops over because you don't want to deal with the journalist.
Next thing you know, your name, address (indirect as it may be, it took all of 2 minutes to piece together), picture, details of your life, details of your family members, etc. is plastered all over the front page of the paper.

I'm sure the resulting controversy wouldn't hurt the journalist and paper very much, but your question was whether that is unethical. I guess you'd have to ask yourself - and maybe get back to us.

Re:I wasn't aware this was unethical...

[Anonymous Coward]

"And why is his life in danger?"

Man, you don't know anything about bankers do you?

Re:I wasn't aware this was unethical...

[tom229]

I can't help but notice that he didn't actually try very hard to remain anonymous. His full name is plastered all over the source code for crying out loud. That's what makes this news story so strange. Is this really him? Why would you use your full name and then try to hide... in plain sight? The whole thing doesn't make any sense if you ask me.

Re:I wasn't aware this was unethical...

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps he is more interested in privacy than anonymity. He doesn't care that people know he created bitcoin, but he just doesn't want to talk to people about it. What I thought was so strange was that no one found him sooner given he used his real name.

Re:I wasn't aware this was unethical...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is his life in danger?
Because the guy owns a shitload of bitcoins. And unscrupulous people want them. Badly.
See: https://xkcd.com/538/ Do some thinking and I think you'll realize why.

Re:I wasn't aware this was unethical...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because he is reputed to have ~$500M in a possibly easily stealable form and no protection. He is also vulnerable to e.g. extortion from kidnapping of his family members.

Re:I wasn't aware this was unethical...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know if I would call it newsworthy. It might be interesting for some people who want to know more about the person.

But there is a reason he chose privacy and has shunned being in any form of limelight. Should we respect that or disregard that desire?

IMO: It should have been respected.

I don't see anybody chasing down the author of Flappy Bird, or Bill Watterson.

Re:I wasn't aware this was unethical...

[Anonymous Coward]

What good came of "uncovering" this particular anonymous guy? nothing at all, there is _no_ story in it, and he is no hiding to avoid answering questions he should answer to the public. so yes, it is unethical. Why do journalists think outing eveyone for their every little thing is a good thing? (btw, i skipped breakfast this morning, better write it up in case you uncover anonymous me in the future). Go uncover some true attrocities, theres plenty of those goiong on on local, and global levels. dont fuck over people for fun. that is unethical indeed.

Re:I wasn't aware this was unethical...

[Anonymous Coward]

It is only ethical if it is in the public interest, so you can debate whether Nakomoto's true identity is in the public interest or not.

If the came round to your house and went through all your rubbish on the hopes that they find a juicy story, then yeah, that's pretty unethical.

Would the real satoshi please stand up

[verbatim]

I was hoping that it was this guy.

Re:Would the real satoshi please stand up

[Arith]

That site makes my freaking head hurt so much

It's a fabrication.

[Anonymous Coward]

Satoshi Nakamoto , the alleged inventor of Bitcoin, does not exist and never did exist. He is a fabrication created by European banksters who really invented Bitcoin. This "news report" is an attempt to hide that fact.

Re:It's a fabrication.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm listening. Now, can you show some proof on that statement?

I was hoping he was a super intelligent rouge AI

[dloyer]

Hugely disappointed it that is just some old slightly crazy geezer.

It would make a great sci-fi story if it was really a rouge AI that became incredibly powerful by redefining the concept of money in a way that it could create at will. It would create a new empire without anyone realizing that it was not actually human.

Sigh

Reminds me of somebody

[chud67]

Satoshi Nakamoto is the tech world's J.D. Salinger.

Re:US campaigns. Soros is citizen of Hungary

[hamburger lady]

soros has been a US citizen since 1961. probably longer than you've been alive.

Yeah, sure....

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and by the way, as a former reporter...

The Tarzana Pennysaver?

Re:I was hoping he was a super intelligent rouge A

[RightSaidFred99]

I am a super intelligent mauve AI, you insensitive...

The article makes me want to puke.

[Anonymous Coward]

If the reporter had even a modicum of shame and civility, he would just have dropped his story.

Required reading: "To Kill a Mockingbird".

c'mon now

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you actually ever personally seen Warren Buffet in a Dairy Queen?

Lost coins

[Anonymous Coward]

Many people tried out bitcoin in the early days only to shrug it off as something that would amount to nothing. Those private keys (wallets) have since been lost/deleted/formatted. Thats why the coins have never moved.

Re:Lost coins

[Ralph Wiggam]

I find it hard to believe that someone else mined a million coins (6% of the total), lost their private key, and never mentioned it on the internet after they became worth a billion dollars.

Re:Lost coins

[Tom]

Not a single someone, he's probably mention it. But how about 100,000 individual someones, each of whom mined (on average) 10 or so coins? That's a few thousand bucks these days, not something that would make headlines beyond your Facebook page.

Re:Lost coins

[Ralph Wiggam]

Not a single someone, he's probably mention it. But how about 100,000 individual someones, each of whom mined (on average) 10 or so coins? That's a few thousand bucks these days, not something that would make headlines beyond your Facebook page.

No. I don't think that 100,000 people were mining bitcoins in early 2009. Actually, I'm quite sure of it.

Re:Lost coins

[brokenin2]

about 100,000 individual someones, each of whom mined (on average) 10 or so coins?

OK, first, you *can not* mine 10 or so bitcoins. There were no mining pools at first, and that is the only way people mine fewer coins.. And that's not really even correct.. Mining pools mine 25 bitcoins these days, and then share them with their members.. What we're talking about is directly mining coins here, which got mine 50 coins at a time for the first four years or so.

Also, IIRC, most of these coins are held by just a few addresses, not spread among 100,000. The entire population of the bitcoin community was probably less than a few thousand people during the first year.. During the first months it was more like 20 or 30.... maybe less..

Re:Lost coins

[Tom]

Thanks, that is good factual information to have.

Still, would losing 100 or 200 coins make headlines these days when thousands got lost and stolen in what makes the news (Silkroad, Mt. Gox, etc.) ?

Re:Lost coins

[Nyder]

I find it hard to believe that someone else mined a million coins (6% of the total), lost their private key, and never mentioned it on the internet after they became worth a billion dollars.

Who would believe them?

Hiding under his own name?

[mspohr]

What's amazing to me is that he was hiding in plain sight using his own name.
It's hard to believe that in this day and age that it took so long to find him.
(I'd rather play with trains, too... but then I'm about the same age as he is.)

Re:Hiding under his own name?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except there's a big chance it's some random guy who happens to have the same name.

The article was written by someone who decided on the conclusion and totally ignored all evidence leading elsewhere.

The poor guy had a stroke recently, he's in poor health, and now some intrusive "reporter" piles all this extra grief on him.

Re:Hiding under his own name?

[slashmydots]

Well, the seach was pretty thorough with a lot of investigating but you know...nobody uses phone books anymore lol.

So they hired an actor?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since we all know he isn't a real person, I presume this is is The Mandarin?

definition of KTK

[SethJohnson]

KTK= Kidnapped Tortured Killed

The bitcoin creator was smart to try to hide. I'm surprised he didn't do a better job as he seems to understand the myriad concerns of surveillance, secrecy, etc.

Re:definition of KTK

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised he didn't do a better job

Using his real name to start with was his first mistake.

Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is A Satoshi Nakamoto, but not THE Satoshi Nakamoto. That is the wrong guy.

Poor show, Newsweek. It doesn't matter who Satoshi is. What matters is what has been created, and what's to come.

Re:which attracts more weirdos, trucking or bitcoi

[lgw]

I dunno, most of the unstable people I've seen posting on the internet seemed rather hung up about Walmart.

Irrational

[Martin S.]

There are posts on Bitcoin Talk demanding Mr Nakamoto carry out signed Bitcoin transactions to prove that he was the currency's originator.

That is irrational demand because he doesn't claim to be.

https://bitcointalk.org/index....

What's Next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Time in cash in that $400 million and move to a nice gated community with 24-hour security guards and machine gun posts.

You never really get off the CIA payroll

[Anonymous Coward]

Just sayin... once you're on it, you never really "retire."

Something that struck me as odd...

[ttybeast]

"I obtained Nakamoto's email through a company he buys model trains from."
For some reason this quotation from the newsweek article stood out to me.
I know it's standard practice for lots of businesses to sell their email lists
but this came off to me as strange. A reporter calls up looking for a single
customers email address and you just give it to them?

The takeaway for story is...

[Anonymous Coward]

...BitCoin is a U.S. funded honeypot!

Why use his real name if he wanted anonymity?

[Dr. Spork]

Something doesn't add up. If he used anonymizers even for email, why did he attach his *real name* to the Bitcoin project? Vanity? Or what?

Because he's in Omaha.

[attemptedgoalie]

There's like 40 people there, so who's going to jump him?

OK, seriously though, he's loved in Nebraska. I love Cherry Coke. It's my only vice. I've lived in a lot of places, but never could get Cherry Coke in a soda fountain/McDonald's/whatever.

While in Omaha/Lincoln, I was able to get it everywhere. Because Warren might drive through.

Not Him

[cstacy]

I wonder how much (or in what way) "they" paid this guy to pretend to be Satoshi Nakamoto?

newsweek

[Anonymous Coward]

a bunch of conservative irrelevant cunts who have not contributed one useful thing to society

Re:newsweek

[Anonymous Coward]

Newsweek? Conservative? What the FUCK are you smoking? Newsweek makes Think Progress look like the Ku Klux Klan.

Protection from Mt. Gox?

[David Jao]

The people behind Mt. Gox might kill him just to save their business from bankruptcy. It would nicely cover the bitcoins that they lost. There are many ways to make use of bitcoins without cashing them.

But his bitcoins are equally worthless!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not money until you can cash it in. Bitcoins are not going to survive this year and pretty soon people will stop paying real money for them. If he has any sense, he has no bitcoins left.

Also

[Sycraft-fu]

If the answer is "Well his life is in danger because he has lots of money in Bitcoins that can be stolen!" well, then there's another flaw in Bitcoins, or at least in keeping Bitcoins on your own hardware, which is what BTCheads have been advocating since the Mt. Gox 'asploded.

This isn't an issue for a normal rich people, because they don't keep their money in something like paper currency that can be easily stolen. It is in banks. So you break in to their house and kill them... well you don't get any of their money. The bank doesn't say "Oh hey you killed the guy, so by RPG loot rules you get his money!" If that's a concern with Bitcoin because it is like keeping lots of cash on hand, well that's another disadvantage now isn't it?

Re:Also

[Anonymous Coward]

Threat of violence (or worse) towards a family member of yours will make you hand over money regardless of whether it happens to be deposited in a bank or represented by Bitcoin(s).

But he didn't actually hide

[sirwired]

If he had called himself by some sort of clever pseudonym, that might make sense. But going by your birth name isn't exactly stealthy... name changes are part of public record.

He didn't exactly give press releases as Mr. BitCoin, but that's not the same thing as trying to stay anonymous. Unheralded yes, anonymous, no.

Re:But he didn't actually hide

[QuasiSteve]

That wasn't the question though, was it? The question was whether releasing the information that has been released was unethical.

The only way in which I can interpret your reply as being an answer to that question, is "if your name is on public record, everything is fair game, and not unethical to publish".

NSA is the 'other people"

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad guys use cash. Tracking physical cash is a PITA. NSA develops a virtual currency, releases it in the wild so they can track bad guys from the comfort of Virginia or Salt Lake or wherever they live now.

NSA secrets start to get outed by Snowden, time to shut the whole thing down. Burn down Mt Gox and other exchanges, finger their 'agent' Nakamoto who probably didn't know he was working for them to begin with. Now the story ends with Nakamoto and all loose ends are cleared up.

Why isn't this stalking and the reporter charged?

[Trax3001BBS]

I read a bit of the story the guy didn't want contact, but this Leah McGrath Goodman (a women go figure) has to have a story.

Are you really that gullible?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any idea how many people DESPISE buffet? Rich people have LOTS of security. The richest men on Earth have the BEST.. and the best is generally unseen by those who do not know where to look.

Were you unaware that Buffet's company was once a manufacturing firm in the US with many workers (making buttoned-shirts IIRC) but he dumped them all and used the remaining shell of a company to become the modern investment firm? Billions of dollars later, he insists Americans pay higher taxes (while taking all the breaks he can get) and insists the TAXPAYERS (the middle-class chumps who cannot afford armies of accounants and off-shore accounts, of course) pay to provide things like unemployment checks and universal healthcare (did he ever provide anything, like healthcare, to all those workers he kicked to the curb and trashed while making HIS billions?) Amongst the thousands of people he trashed on the way up, how many do you think get angry every time they hear a news story mention him and his billions? He needs excellent security because it only takes ONE angry person to cause him lots of trouble, and like Jacob Marley, he has spent many years forging links in his personal chain. Buffet has lots of fans in the investment classes, and he's a hero of some on the left who love his funding of their causes, BUT he's made lots of enemies along the way that many other millionaires and billionaires have not made. When you add-in all the crazies that go after any other rich and/or powerful person (some who would do violence just out of hatred, some who would do violence to get money, and some who would simply be hanging-on and begging for money or help) his security concerns are monumental. This is just one of many reasons why I do not envy the uber-rich. You think he walks into a Dairy Queen sans security? Did it occur to you he might OWN that particular Dairy Queen and than some or all of the employees and/or customers who are there when he is are actually part of his security? One of the nice things about the modern secret service and the modern military is that people of both genders and a wide range of ages and ethnicites are available as "former members of" and can get jobs in private security...

Every block header is unique

[Anonymous Coward]

Every block header is unique, containing not only the monotonically increasing block number, but also a Merkle root hash of all the transactions contained within the block.

If you find a nonce such that the mining condition "Hash (Header|Nonce) target" is satisfied, then there is no point "keeping" it for later, as it will not be reusable.

Why? Lindberg Baby that's why

[dbIII]

Someone seen as being very wealthy can be viewed as a target by those that want to quickly secure wealth by means of violence.

Mining is the process of finding the hash

[Anonymous Coward]

The key concept in bitcoin is the "proof of work" which adds a transaction to the public ledger, the blockchain. By requiring real resources to be expended, it helps keeps the transaction ledger "honest", as if a transaction is subseuqently found to be invalid, then the work expended will be invalidated.

The proof of work is arranging for the hash of the transactions + block headers + nonce to be less than a target value. A "miner" collates transactions broadcast off the network, and repeatedly tries different values of nonce in a search to find a qualifying hash. Once they find a hash, they broadcast the new block containing the headers, nonce and transaction details.

Because the miner groups the transactions into the block, they control what transactions are go into the block. As a block can contain only a limited number of transactions, most miners will sort transactions into descending order of fee paid.

In addition to grouping received transactions into the block for processing, the miner is permitted to include a special transaction which collects the transaction fees paid for transactions in that block and pays them to the miner; at the same time, this special transaction will also "spawn" some new coins into the same account as a temporary "reward". The miner has to follow the network rules about this, they can't just generate a reward of 1,000,000 BTC, because no other nodes will accept that block. The network follows the rule that block numbers 1-210,000 carry a reward of 50 BTC, 210,001-420,000 carry 25 BTC, with the reward halving every 210k blocks eventually reaching the minimum currency unit of 1e-8 BTC, after which the reward will be extinguished.

The reason for the taper was to limit the total number of coins generated, without a massive shock if generation suddenly stopped. The taper period was made long to allow a "fair" time period for the coins to be distributed among as many people as possible.

The bitcoin network is designed to generate blocks at a roughly constant rate of 1 block every 10 minutes. As more hashing power enters the network, the rate at which blocks will be generated increases, because finding a suitable nonce is a probabilistic process. To counter this, the network monitors the rate at which blocks are generated and alters the hash target value to keep the block generation time roughly constant. As more hash power comes online, the target value is reduced, making suitable hashes rarer. The opposite can happen if hash power leaves the network (but in general this has never happened to a significant extent in bitcoin, but happens regularly in the clone coins).

Horrible Journalism - Totally Agreed

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod Up Parent.

FTFA:
"Satoshi Nakamoto's 2008 online proposal also hints at his age, with the odd reference to "disk space" - something that hasn't been an issue since the last millennium - and older research citations of contemporaries' work going back to 1957."

"...uses weird notation of 2 spaces after a period."

Did anyone else catch these moronic comments?

Pity~~

[Anonymous Coward]

I find that Japan has a lot to give the world - and given: ocarina, Roland and Korg electronic instruments, zen Buddhism, origami, anime, the food!!. I love their culture really. It's arguably the richest culture in the world, so I usually give them the benefit of the doubt. But #1 This guy is an American (awful culture) and #2 . $h1tc01n sucks and must DIE!! lol. I can't deny I already have less hatred towards the currency, but still my primary problem remains: It's got NO industrial use/intrinsic value. I just can't get behind it.

mother?

[Anonymous Coward]

well.. if he's 64, perhaps his mother is LIVING WITH HIM.
Sometimes elderly folks move back in with their adult children.

Of course i know nothing of this person or his life.

Cutouts

[Anonymous Coward]

Somewhere a grizzly mostly white man with dreadlocks down to his ass is chuckling.... here's to you, Jim

Money laundering

[sjbe]

Dude there are Mclaren MP4s for sale for Bitcoins

Does the term money laundering mean anything to you? There are only two reasons to sell a car for bitcoins. One is because you are trying to hide the source of funds and the other is because you are speculating. Otherwise doing that is utterly retarded. It makes no financial sense whatsoever for the seller of the car.

, people are buying land and mansions with them, you can get takeaways delivered, bars and restaurants accept them

Right. Show me where that happens. Show me multiple examples of people who are buying large assets in bitcoin and not engaged in money laundering or fraud. If someone is accepting bitcoin to for real estate for real then they are taking an insane amount of financial risk and quite simply there aren't many people out there that are likely to do something that dumb. Furthermore if a bar or other retail business is accepting bitcoins (I'm aware a few are trying) as anything other than a promotional scheme and not charging a hefty transaction premium then they are financially illiterate. It's cute to do a few transactions maybe as a marketing scheme but I assure you that it is not a large portion of their business, at least not if they wish to stay in business.

Converting $500M bitcoin to cash is MASSIVELY short sighted.

First off, again, it ISN'T $500M. That is paper value. It's like people who get a stock option grant and are "worth" millions on paper that they cannot actually get access to. He CANNOT sell them for that much money. It isn't possible. If he tried he would crash the already volatile market. Second, there is NO guarantee that bitcoins will hold the value they currently have into the future and even less guarantee that they will rise in value. Continuing to hold a significant amount of them without diversifying into other assets is quite simply dumb. It's a speculative bubble like tulips or beenie babies or the stock market 15 years ago. If the guy has that many bitcoins and he isn't steadily liquidating them into other assets then he's very likely to experience a significant loss in the not to distant future.

oblig

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck all, but jesus christ am I getting tired of the "obligatory xkcd" meme. It's not obligatory, and you are not making the world a wonderful place by endlessly repeating a dorky catchphrase which links to a comic.

The root of evil ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a world where those who have large amounts of money trying to arbitrate the right of those who have just been born, convincing everyone that the money should stay within a particular institution.
Imagine how angry these people feel that a person can free forever those who are less from the tyranny of having more!
It is at least wickedness, saying where is the creator of this possibility!
So I say, I'm Satoshi, not this person who in this matter!
After the scandals of North American espionage against many countries, anyone still think the the public encryption system is secure?
Play bitcoin to buy lanchess is one thing.But , Create a digital economy countries is quite another thing, with more social, economic, political and financial consequences. Please leave this big guy alone, and his toy too!

He has dual citizenship.

[GPS Pilot]

You're both right. He has dual citizenship. It's interesting that you were so eager to try to correct the person who spoke of Hungary being "his country." The country of his birth is arguably more "his country" than the other country in which he holds citizenship.