Newsweek Says It Found Bitcoin's Founder: 4 Things To Know
As we told you last week in our Bitcoin Explainer For Those Who Don't Care About Bitcoin, the elusive founder of the crypto-currency goes by the name Satoshi Nakamoto. He/she/they released code and concept in 2008 but disappeared from cyberspace in 2011, when he/she/they stopped responding to emails from Bitcoin's key developers.
So who is Satoshi Nakamoto? That riddle has all the right elements of a mystery novel — intrigue, money, a dash of conspiracy — and it's no wonder that Reddit, tech blogs and mainstream media outlets alike have been speculating for years.
But Thursday, Newsweek's Leah McGrath Goodman said she finally found the answer.
Newsweek's first print magazine cover since January 2013, when the publication announced it would discontinue its physical magazine, shows a dark figure in a suit, with glasses made out of the Bitcoin symbol. "Bitcoin's Face," it announces. "The Mystery Man Behind The Crypto-Currency."
But like the rest of Bitcoin's rocky existence, this too has a controversy.
1. Newsweek says the mystery man is — wait for it — Satoshi Nakamoto.
Yes, the name that everyone thought was fake is actually real, Goodman says. She reports that he is a 64-year-old Japanese-American man living in Southern California, whose family says he's distrustful of government, fearful of the media, brilliant and "an asshole." Satoshi is his birth name, but he goes by Dorian, Goodman reports.
It should be noted that the research methods leading to this conclusion are by no means scientific. Goodman only followed the trail of people named Satoshi Nakamoto and didn't look into the other suspects. It's a bit of a circular argument — if you only investigate people with one name, all the people you investigate will have that name.
So either this report is a self-fulfilling prophecy, or it's either totally brilliant, as one Redditor said Thursday on the site's Bitcoin subreddit:
So you're telling me that the inventor of a novel piece of computer science, who wrote the code for bitcoin, and goes by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto...
...is actually a software engineer with a strong background in mathematics who has lived and worked in the tech industry in the US, and is called Satoshi Nakamoto.
How on Earth did anyone not figure this out already? Was everyone trying to find a conspiracy?