
Reddit's Satoshi Nakamoto Skeptics - yayitswei
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/03/reddits-satoshi-nakamoto-skeptics.html
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JumpCrisscross
> _rather than taking [Redditors '] skepticism seriously, many media outlets
> pounced instead on the story of their “rage,” scouring the site for examples
> of death threats, violence, or outright lunacy, which were then published
> with much fanfare._

We are still learning how to live in a connected and recorded world. Even the
most coherent natural conversations, when put on paper, make for strained
reading. The thread of thought jerks around implications and exclamations of
hyperbole. Cherry-picking hiccups is a thoughtless exercise in missing the
forest for the trees.

We lived in a connected world before. Small town talk connected communities.
The chatter then was likely as belligerent as Twitter is today. The
difference, though, is gossip is (usually) ephemeral while written words
persist. Society didn't seek to document and re-broadcast the petty thoughts
of suburban Geneva on the loucheness of New Yorkers. If something was to cross
the Atlantic, it would have to carry more substance.

Perhaps it will take a new generation of reporters to effect the change. One
more enamoured by, and driven to explore, the message versus the medium.

~~~
GuiA
Henry David Thoreau:

"We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas;
but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate…. As if
the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to
tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the
New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad,
flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping
cough."

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adamnemecek
I can't get over the fact that the New Yorker is quoting some reddit users
using their online nicknames.

~~~
alexmat
At least for me, I know more people by their handles than their real names.
Not sure if that's the case for most people though.

~~~
XorNot
I once sent an ambulance to someone's house and told them to ask for the guy
by his screen name since it was all I had to go off of.

~~~
bennyg
What happened, if you don't mind me asking?

~~~
XorNot
Someone posting worryingly that they might be attempting to suicide by pills.
It all worked out though, and they're doing better these days.

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waylandsmithers
I'm a little surprised that the New Yorker (although this is a New Yorker
blog, so maybe it's not the "real" New Yorker) is doing the
HuffPo/Gawker/Buzzfeed kind of "look what just happened on Reddit!" type of
post.

However, as a former reporter, I can understand the temptation of looking at
reddit as a treasure trove of quotes and opinions that require no more than a
few clicks to use in an article.

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devindotcom
Interesting that the writer seems to take what is described as "rage" (a meme
reference) and "sound and fury" (idiomatic) literally. Other than that, this
is rather a tardy and something less than nuanced summary of the events of the
last week or so. Kind of strange - I thought the magazine was working to
modernize its tech coverage.

~~~
pyalot2
New Yorkers coverage is always kinda meh. Like, why quote random reddit users?
They could've quoted Gavin, Eric, Andreas etc. Also, that's a lot of words in
that article to say the bitcoin subreddit went apeshit over Newsweek.

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spdub
I don't know how often I have actually seen this, but it was interesting to
note that the references to _Newsweek_ were simply italics instead of
hyperlinks. After recently studying pagerank I found that an interesting
tactic, whether or now pure hyperlinks are stil used in the calculations vs
some other metric.

~~~
mburns
That is what rel='nofollow' was invented for.

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flylib
anyone remember this? In 2011, they did like 5 page investigative piece trying
to find Satoshi Nakamoto's true identity.

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/10/111010fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/10/111010fa_fact_davis)

I love how they are trying to play dumb now when they were the ones that
originally crossed the lines.

~~~
martey
That article is explicitly linked in the current article (see "Joshua Davis
wrote about the search for Nakamoto in 2011"). If they were "trying to play
dumb", they probably would not have mentioned it.

~~~
flylib
it took them 5 days to publish an article regarding it though and the fact
that Newsweek was able to get a lead so quick (not saying it's the right guy)
seems they like didn't do due diligence in the first place, I asked the author
of The New Yorker piece for comment on the recent developments.

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exo762
> "no paper, copper, or silver—just thirty-one lines of code"

Joshua Davis is incompetent. Maria Bustillos is incompetent too.

~~~
wikiburner
You forgot Gary Marcus. I don't know why anyone would look to the New Yorker
for tech coverage.

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d0ugie
I hope, for this man's sake and for the reporter too, that this story's
evaporation of its shelf life is expiring.

It just feels like something that belongs in those trashy grocery store gossip
magazines, meanwhile we're the rubberneckers causing some sort of metaphorical
traffic jam.

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nl
I have a Satoshi theory.

During the early-2000's there was an online location (being deliberately vague
here) where there was an individual who was very excited about the idea of
decentralised accounting.

At the time most people ignored everything that author was saying. Now, his
comments seem strangely prescient.

That authors writing seems somewhat similar to Satoshi's, too.

Additionally at least one domain name that author had control over is a
Japanese site (although it looks to be pretty spammy, and not Bitcoin
related).

OTOH, there was little evidence that I saw that this person had the necessary
skills to create Bitcoin.

~~~
iSnow
Sorry, this is way too vague to be worth of anything. After all, a lot of the
cypherpunks movement was in love with decentralized money, but only one gal,
guy or group made something usable out of this.

~~~
nl
I'm not trying to imply that I know who Satoshi is. More that I have a
hypothesis, and I'm not really too sure how to test it.

I'm not entirely sure that I would/should/could investigate it further anyway.
Satoshi seems to value his or her privacy, and even if anyone had information
that could piece that shield I'm not sure they should.

But meh.. like you say. I'm probably wrong anyway. OTOH.. how would someone
verify something like this? As far as I can see there is no compelling way to
do it, without Satoshi deciding to unmask themselves.

~~~
sentenza
I'd say this sounds like a case of "Idea whose time has come". Sometimes, the
flow of culture and technology creates a situation in which certain ideas keep
bubbling up. Might be that decentralized accounting is one of those ideas in
this day and age.

I mean, there are a bunch of ideas that half of us have had at one point or
another, independently. Decentralized refrigeration boxes for grocery-to-the-
home delivery is also one of those ideas, autonomically interacting vehicle
computers is another.

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girvo
In this topic, a mainstream media publication treats a loosely coupled online
group of millions of disparate people as if they were a monolithic entity.

News at 11.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
It's properly "Film at 11":
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_at_11](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_at_11)

~~~
jnbiche
Maybe, but "News at 11" was definitely part of local stations' vocabulary when
I was growing up.

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gtirloni
Is the supposed Satoshi Nakamoto posting in these forums using Tor? If not,
what is his IP address?

The people with the means (NSA, CIA, etc) already know who he is (or can
easily find out).

