
Linguistic Analysis Says Newsweek Named The Wrong Man As Bitcoin's Creator - atmosx
http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2014/03/10/data-analysis-says-newsweek-named-the-wrong-man-as-bitcoins-creator/
======
fchollet
We're talking about a man who doesn't have the Internet at his home (but uses
public library computers), a home who writes this kind of email
([http://i.imgur.com/DB4oq5s.png](http://i.imgur.com/DB4oq5s.png)), a man with
no previous experience with cryptography or economics theory, a man who
stated:

 _" I have never communicated with bitcoins"._

Did this man create the first distributed digital cryptocurrency? No. Instead,
here's what happened: Newsweek senior writer Leah McGrath Goodman went
scouring a database that contained the registration cards of naturalized U.S.
citizens (for the record, Nakamoto is the ~400th most common Japanese name).
"A Satoshi Nakamoto" then turned up who had a physics/engineering background.
She interviewed the man's family, fabricated a few quotes implying involvement
with Bitcoin (or took the quotes out of context, which is equivalent), and
published a clickbait story destroying the man's privacy.

That's it.

~~~
beedogs
Pretty damning indictment of Newsweek if this is what passes for
"investigative journalism" there.

~~~
fchollet
We're talking about Newsweek here.

Remember the "Heaven is real!" cover?
([https://ksj.mit.edu/tracker/2012/10/heaven-real-doctors-
expe...](https://ksj.mit.edu/tracker/2012/10/heaven-real-doctors-experience-
afterlife))

Remember "The Fall of France"? ([http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-
sinclair/france-newsweek-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-
sinclair/france-newsweek-article_b_4550066.html))

------
ig1
The Cuckoo's Calling was identified as being Rowling's work due to the fact
her lawyer leaked it, the fact this analyst is claiming credit for it (but is
carefully worded to allow for multiple readings) doesn't give me a lot of
confidence in their ability.

~~~
raverbashing
Yes, still, someone could leak "Book X is by Author A" regardless of it being
true.

The main issue are the candidates. However, I believe that for this type of
analysis exclusion of a certain candidate is much more reliable than finding
the one who did it (as the article exemplifies)

------
Tycho
There was a recent episode of House of Cards where the protagonists were
exposed in the media over something. They came up with a false cover story,
but they also deliberately bungled their response (asked another party to deny
the claims completely, then somewhat contracted them in their own statement).
The reasoning was that people would smell a cover up if everything was too
neat.

I wonder if Dorian Satoshi used the same tactic. Once a journalist discovers
him, he tacitly admits to being the Bitcoiner, then in his next public
statement retracts this and says it was a misunderstanding. Now everyone's
going about saying the real Satoshi would never have responded to the
journalist like that.

Probably not but arguably it would be the best way to handle the situation if
you wanted the story to blow over.

~~~
codr
Given that he did at first admit to being previously involved, you just might
be on to something..

~~~
jotux
His "admission" was very, very weak.

    
    
        "I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it," he says, dismissing all further queries with a swat of his left hand. "It's been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection."
    

For all we know he was confused and thought she was talking about his
previous, possibly classified, work.

~~~
Eliezer
Or the reporter was talking about his previous work, and took the quote
completely out of context. Or the reporter was told to deliver the story, and
just plain lied. Have you ever dealt with an actual reporter?

~~~
SilasX
It's well-known that journalists get things wrong, but to outright swap the
referent of a pronoun for a completely different one? Is that typical for
reporters?

~~~
Eliezer
Far as I can tell.

------
jnye131
What terrible UI on that website. I think in 2014 we know how to scroll
already and don't need a full page pop-over to explain it.

~~~
bduerst
I think Forbes recently rolled out their endless scroll to get recent with web
UI standards. They're softening the blow to their less tech savvy users.

~~~
annnnd
You can't document your way out of UI mess, so it's still failure on their
side.

------
pierrebai
Does anyone knows enough about the stylometry to judge if letters to editors
and a letter to a local government can really be compared to a white paper? It
seems to me that in tones, style and vocabulary, these are very different
format which would not yield good result.

Has the expert actually ever tried his technique to infer the author of a
white paper based on sample of correspondence?

~~~
jnbiche
I don't know about "stylometry", but textual analysis is definitely a field
that is grounded in statistics and probability.

And here's an excellent textual analysis of Satoshi's writing -- really quite
convincing: [https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-
nakam...](https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-nakamoto-is-
probably-nick-szabo/)

The verdict? Nick Szabo, a professor of computer science at GWU and trained
attorney, with significant expertise in the digital economy and smart
contracts. He's got a fascinating blog at:
[http://szabo.best.vwh.net/](http://szabo.best.vwh.net/)

To be honest, I was convinced by this particular analysis back in December,
but I haven't been passing it around because I respected Satoshi's desire for
anonymity. However, now that an innocent man is being hounded and harassed, I
think it's about time that the creator step up and claim his creation. We also
need to know what happened to the Satoshi stash for this amazing project to
move forward with greater certainty.

So I would encourage the real Satoshi to step up. I'm not at all convinced
that Dorian Nakamoto -- albeit a pretty fascinating man -- is actually the
creator of Bitcoin.

~~~
rdl
It's a weak tie between Szabo and Satoshi. Both write in
cryptographer/academic/cypherpunk style. That's true of plenty of other likely
Satoshis. Most of the specific phrases which link the two are fairly standard
phrases within the community.

I do think Szabo is in a top-100 list of Satoshi candidates, and the most
damning linkage is Satoshi's failure to cite Szabo, but it's far from
conclusive.

~~~
jnbiche
Yes, but there are a few other things that I'm thinking about writing about.
They may not implicate Szabo conclusively, but it's pretty clear (to me, at
least) that Satoshi is an academic. In any case, it's not Dorian Nakamoto. I'm
sorry he's having to endure this scrutiny (especially after what he and his
family went through during WWII).

~~~
rdl
It could easily be an academic who is outside academia (e.g. Zooko), or a team
of academic + non-academic.

------
MWil
Her twitter posts at the bottom take the Newsweek reporter's credibility even
lower if you ask me. A lot of people would have loved to talk with you pre-
story, lady!

~~~
jonnathanson
She doesn't come off well in those comments, but neither does the Forbes
writer. Journalistic etiquette and best practice is to ask someone for comment
if you're going to be writing about her. Ideally, you should make that attempt
in earnest and in advance.

If, as alleged, he emailed her at 10:50pm the night before he went to press --
and then said "she could not be reached for comment" and/or "she did not
respond" \-- he was being either lazy or disingenuous in that regard.

Her Twitter comments make her sound petty, but at least one of her complaints
seems legitimate. She felt that she got railroaded here.

~~~
AJ007
Welcome to pageview journalism. There is no etiquette, accuracy doesn't
matter. Pageviews do.

In the past if you published crap you lost the high quality advertisers. Now
advertisers just go where the audience is, like the Huffington Post and
Business Insider. In other words, all journalists are gossip columnists now.
Even better if they wrote for free.

~~~
jonnathanson
There's certainly been a trend towards optimizing for pageviews and clickbait
above all other considerations. That trend has had a horrendous effect on the
average quality of journalism in this country, by dint of the brutal economics
of pageview advertising. (In recent years, focus has shifted away from
pageviews and toward shares, engagement, etc. But it's mostly the same shit,
different day: pay writers as little as possible, crank out heavy volume, bait
people with headlines, weave vanity metrics into ad dollars.)

But I see a bright spot in all of this. In a sea of crap, good content might
glimmer on the surface, wherever it appears. There's been a serious backlash
among the tech and journalism communities against content farms and clickbait.
People are, once again, experimenting with quality. Whether quality will be
able to last depends on whether anyone can figure out how to make money from
quality, and that's the unfortunate truth of the matter. Meanwhile, content
farming is a gravity well that seems to suck every new publication down into
oblivion, slowly but inevitably. A tweak here, an optimization there, a
formula plied and followed, and before you know it, you're writing emotionally
manipulative headlines and minimizing costs (and quality), like everyone else.
But wow, look at those shares and pageviews! :)

I guess I still have hope. Otherwise I wouldn't be involved in journalism
right now. For my part: I don't trade in gossip. I don't write clickbait
(though typically, and depending on the publication, I don't have editorial
control over my headlines or promotional copy). I try to be interesting. I try
to be thoughtful. I try to have standards. I have yet to make a serious living
as a writer, and until that changes, writing will remain a part-time gig. But
I'm an optimist.

I suspect that whoever figures out how to monetize quality writing will do it
by reaching back to first principles, rethinking the idea of publishing
altogether. Trying to prop up a digital business on the scaffolding of a
centuries-old business model makes no sense.

------
trackofalljades
"Linguistic analysis" and...pretty much every facet of evidence there is.
Newsweek is such a joke.

------
caio1982
As a linguist and computer nerd I can't read articles like this without
shouting inside my own head "NLP with no open source code is not NLP!" and
then I can never trust the person again, like the author of this... analysis,
so even if he's nailed it, and it's really Satoshi, to me it would be just a
struck of luck and not a linguistic discovery per se IMHO.

~~~
dbbolton
Using a non-trivial computer program to conduct research and not disclosing
the source is basically like leaving the Methods section of a paper blank. The
code could literally be doing anything, regardless of what the author _claims_
it does. They don't even need to release it under a free license- just show
it.

------
Zigurd
Would Dorian Nakamoto's writing style still be identifiable if he had the
Bitcoin paper professionally edited? If he had that done on-line, it would
have cost very little.

~~~
runner84111
Who has other people edit their tex files...

~~~
davorak
It is pretty easy. If the editor works in word then you copy the tex and past
it into word. Then tell the editor to not mess with the funny symbols and
images etc. Use track changes and reject any changes that would mess up the
tex.

Then just compile the tex to enjoy a beautiful laid out and professionally
edited document.

------
stcredzero
A new plan:

1) Invent a disruptive technology that threatens the foundations of
governments and traditional currencies.

2) Deliberately create a corpus of writing that doesn't look like your natural
writing style to linguistic analysis.

3) Have a confederate arrange to have the press "discover" you hiding "in
plain sight."

4) Someone "debunks" the discovery through linguistic analysis and you get
away scott free.

~~~
6d0debc071
1) Invent a disruptive technology that threatens the foundations of
governments and traditional currencies.

2) Upload the idea at a semi-random time in the future, from a random location
in a randomly chosen country, over a public network, using a computer bought
with cash from a randomly chosen store. Have that computer link to it from as
many places as possible.

3) Never speak about it.

\-------------

If a highly weight goal of yours is not being found, then you limit your
interactions, since you know that you'll leak information whenever you
interact with something. And you randomise as many data points as you can
think of that someone might correlate with you.

Then again, Satoshi obviously isn't doing 3 - assuming the Satoshi persona is
the person who invented it.

------
newerguy
The real Satoshi would have thought of linguistic analysis and taken
appropriate action during his writing.

~~~
r00fus
But is the "real Satoshi" a true Scotsman?

~~~
saraid216
The real Satoshi is obviously Japanese and thus would have a katana available
at all times.

[http://www.xkcd.com/225/](http://www.xkcd.com/225/)

------
trillium
Linguistic analysis isn't a field I particularly trust. If they were analyzing
his Reddit posts, I'd find that potentially an issue. People post quite
differently on Reddit.

~~~
mathattack
And a true paranoid could fake styles.

~~~
VMG
And would not use his real name.

~~~
mathattack
I wonder if that was an accident that he couldn't back out of. A programming
game that turned into, "Holy sh*t, this might go somewhere" but it was too
late to turn into a synonym.

------
zby
Maybe the author of bitcoin used the name Satoshi Nakamoto because he knew
that journalists would find Dorian Nakamoto?

------
Ryel
Personally I hope we never find Satoshi. Chuck Norris was getting old
anyway...

------
matznerd
I do not think it is him.

~~~
netw1z
why

~~~
netw1z
did I really get a downvote for asking why? wow. tough crowd.

~~~
wlesieutre
People here can be picky about things like sentences, capitalization, and
punctuation. Try asking "Why?" instead.

~~~
saraid216
Personally, I'd go ask _why.

~~~
mintplant
HN also doesn't like jokes.

~~~
saraid216
Eh. My goal for karma is 666. Unfortunately, I seem to make a lot of good
points.

