Simple question for anyone who’s familiar with this world of journalism: how does the author and the NYTimes cope with the fact that making such claims paint a huge target on the person they claim to have “unmasked”?
Satoshi’s wallets are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and there have been kidnappings/torture/murders for much less than that.
Do they just not care about the ethical implications?
And really, for what? What is gained by “unmasking” Satoshi other than satisfying one’s curiosity? There is no argument to be made there for the greater public good or anything like that.
The NYTimes infamously doxxed Slate Star Codex[1], despite him basically begging them not to because it would upend his psychiatry practice, back in 2020 for no reason other than because they could.
One of their journalists also doxxed Naomi Wu, intruding on her personal life, making her lose her income, and possibly getting her in trouble with Chinese authorities:
https://x.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/1209815150376574976
Kinda goes to show you the kind of people who write these stories. Ethics haven't been on their mind for a long time, and them preaching to anyone about ethics is rank hypocrisy.
> A third tweet posted by Jeong in 2014 said, “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.”
I moderated a large Reddit community (circa 2014). She threatened to have articles written about how we were racist/misogynistic, unless we removed comments she didn't like.
There’s a context to that you’re missing. The people saying that are usually using the formulation that racism = prejudice + power. So can black people in the U.K. be prejudiced? Yes, definitely. Racist? They’d need to be in a position of authority for it to matter.
Other people use the formulation racism = prejudice about race, and end up talking past each other.
You are correct that there are multiple somewhat-conflicting definitions of racism but “taking past each other” isn’t really what’s happening.
The “classic” definition of racism is something like “a system of oppression based on race”. People pull that out to explain why “[minority] people can’t be racist”, but that that definition isn’t about people. It’s about systems, so if we take that definition, no individual can be racist. Most of the same people who trot out this definition will still call majority-race individuals racist (clearly using a different definition). It’s a rhetorical sleight of hand to swap definitions in a self serving way like this.
> racism = prejudice + power
This seems like an oversimplified perversion of the “systemic” definition and doesn’t make sense if you actually consider it. By this definition a poor white woman basically couldn’t be racist, while a rich black man could.
There's a term for that: systemic racism. The redefining racism thing just comes from a bunch of people who wanted to be racist without admitting racism -- often, ironically, from a position of power.
Systemic racism is something different. It's the legal system being set up in a way that favors/disfavors certain groups. It's not something a person does.
Yes, it's power + racism, which is the idea that the "power+prejudice" redefinition was getting at with the added clarification that the power has to be real rather than in the eye of the beholder. It achieves the stated purpose of the redefinition but without providing cover for people who want a reason why their racism is good while yours is bad.
Honestly these loudmouths are usually quite privileged themselves. These theatrics are either to deflect from themselves, or they are delusional about how tough their life is.
I agree with your first statement. However I wouldn't dismiss them just because of that: as an analogy, most of the most effective campaigners against slavery were not slaves themselves.
I do agree that in this particular case the lady in question seems rather nasty, and the whole woke movement seems to be quite the circular firing squad.
for a good counterbalance to those just finding out the nyt is a state dept mouthpiece at best, read about real journalists and why there seem to be so few of them, read Pegasus by laurent richard. Spoiler alert, real journalists who expose powerful peoples' wrongdoings simply get killed.
One of the journalists was Jason Koebler who later cofounded 404media. That is imho pretty legit outlet which uncovered many pretty damning stories about tech.
404media is good stuff, one of the few news outlets I pay for. I didn't dig too deep on the above comment because I have a deep respect for journalists despite admittedly many of them servicing things I dislike by choice or coercion or for remuneration or fame, etc. Reading about journalists in more authoritarian countries was seriously depressing
Just like Knight Rider and Matlock had to deliver enough entertainment to keep you from switching channels and instead have you watch the next beer ad.
Btw I don't know how closely you follow Naomi Wu, but take that with grain of salt.
(def. not defending bad journalists)
Naomi has huge youtube and she is very public figure in Shenzhen.
She has very weird opinion on Chinese government, she acts to like it but on the other hand with her sexual orientation (which was public knowledge, plastered all over reddit, twitter etc. way before any articles) and her admitting to bypass Chinese firewall etc. which is illegal.
Kinda weird, to do this, when you're public person.
And weirdest of all, she has/had Uyghur girlfriend and she basically said, that because of us (US/EU people) boycotting China for Xinjiang concentration camps for Uyghurs, nobody in Shenzen wants to hire Uyghur people, so WE are to blame.
I don't know if she really meant it, or she'd post it to twitter to suck Chinese government, you know what.
Imho, with grain of salt too, I think she was partially managed by Chinese agency way before any articles, and they got angry because she was unable to steer the article to "China great, West is bad".
Because I have experience what Chinese agencies are willing to pay for mediocre influencers in my small EU country (10mil. people) just to visit China and make videos how they're "great". And they have 1/10 following of what Naomi has.
Let me shed a tear for the old white men, who hold all the money and power in today’s world p- these heinous social media “attacks” will leave them crying and shaking
I really didn't want to comment on this, but racism, ironically enough doesn't discriminate. If you want to discriminate against white rich people, you then say that you wouldn't against black rich people.
I'm not saying you shouldn't feel upset about rich people's behavior, but their skin color shouldn't enter the conversation.
I don’t want to discriminate against anyone - my point is that you can’t discriminate against people who hold all the power, so I won’t have much sympathy if someone trolls them online.
And yea I believe anyone who is really rich (like 8+ figures rich) is morally bankrupt.
Are you able to explain in 1 short sentence what Vice did wrong to her? Because I can't. I remember reading Wu's explanation and couldn't find anything in there, like at all. It was filled with prejudice.
Funny enough in her own words, they don't much care..
> You’re wrong. NYT does pay attention to subscriber cancellations. It’s one of the metrics for “outrage” that they take to distinguish between “real” outrage and superficial outrage. What subscribers say can back up dissenting views inside the paper about what it should do and be.
I am not sure this is that clear cut. Naomi Wu agreed to interview then didn't want to answer some of the questions - instead of just saying no… she wrote social media threads and blogposts about how she can't talk about this because it's big bad china and all these western journalists are unprofessional not knowing her risk. For some reason then she tried to actually dox one of the journalists in her video.
Unfortunately looking back it seems pretty plausible that chinese gov censored her exactly because of her blogposts about how she is in danger in china.
The journalist knew what she was doing. Naomi was in China, agreed to do an interview about her self & her work, then the journo tried to drum up clicks by putting her on the spot about politics.
Real consequences for the interviewee, all for some clicks. That's not journalism.
I've read the original article again and I don't think people read it.
The whole interview is very supportive and based around how much shit she is getting. How she is hated for he appearance, how people don't believe she is technically skilled, that people thinks she is a fake persona or that some male is designing her whole career. Also that she gets many personal threats.
This is just her talking about herself and I am not sure how this is about chinese gov politics or how it is damning/doxing her.
Anyway her response was to find home address of one of the editors and put it in her next video. If i would be journalist and somebody did that to me i would expect my company to use their lawyers.
By releasing personal information which a reasonable person would expect to be private? I don't know the specifics of this case (only responding to the overly vague question) but information like address, private contact info, details about their families. Anything you would not immediately expect to become public knowledge simply by writing about topic(s).
I had a good chuckle going from Banksy on one line to whether the person is committing a crime on the other - that it's a crime was key to how the article claimed to find Banksy's identity and mentioned as one of the likely factors in why Banksy chose to be anonymous early on :D.
I get you mean whether they are causing any actual harm though (and agree for many such unmaskings), it was just an amusing juxtaposition of literal statements.
Although people repeatedly say this, NYT did not in fact dox Slate Star Codex. He revealed his own information because he said they were going to reveal his name based on a draft of the article he says he saw. The verge apparently reported that no draft had been written and the NYT was still in news gathering stage. Who knows what the truth of that is, but factually he released the information.
> The New York Times published an article about the blog in February 2021, three weeks after Alexander had publicly revealed his name.
Funnily enough, in the blog post you linked Scott Alexander also ruminates about how he never previously questioned journalistic attempts to dox Satoshi Nakamoto.
I always found that case a bit odd. For one he was blogging under his real name and had made his medical practice known, so you could just google him.
It was upending his psychiatry practice because he blogged, albeit in anonymized fashion, about his patients without disclosing it to them which I'd say is unethical but at the very least in the interest of his patients to be made known to them. I would be pretty pissed if I recognized something I told my psychiatrist on an internet blog. Frankly given how strongly one has to consent to even legally process clinical data I've never been sure if that was at all legal.
When someone's identity is in the public interest an investigative journalist isn't doxxing anyone, they're doing their job. Both true for Nakamoto and arguably Scott
It's most of his name. Long before his full name became common knowledge, you could already Google "Scott Alexander psychiatrist" and find him almost instantly.
That part of things is what really made this entire argument all apart of me.
There are ~50k psychiatrists in the US. Roughly, 1 in 10k people in the US is named Scott. Mathematically, that means knowing "Scott is a psychiatrist" brings you down to ~5 people. Even if we assume there's some outlier clustering of people named Scott who are psychiatrists, we're still talking about some small number.
Surely adding in the middle name essentially makes him uniquely identifiable without an other corroborating information.
Take a moment and apply some common sense to your math. Do you really think there are 5 psychiatrists in the country named Scott? That's off by multiple orders of magnitude.
> I always found that case a bit odd. For one he was blogging under his real name and had made his medical practice known, so you could just google him.
Cade Metz wrote the article under his real name, and his home address is public information, but presumably he wouldn't appreciate it being published on the internet. Why is that any different?
It’s legal to publish anonymous patient data, doctors do it frequently e.g. in “case studies”. As long as it can’t be traced back to the patient I don’t see why they should care (I wouldn’t). And since it increases public knowledge (e.g. how to treat future patients) I think it’s not only ethical, but should be encouraged.
Doxxing also increases public knowledge, but knowing who’s behind some online pseudonym is much less useful than patient anecdotes (what would you do with the former? Satisfy your interest (or what else do you mean by “public interest”)?). Moreover, unlike anonymous patient data, it has a serious downside: risking someone’s job, relationships, or even life.
In principle, anonymized case studies do not require consent and historically, they were often published without. Without personally identifiable information, this is and always has been 100% legal. But in modern practice, many journals acknowledge that making a case fully anonymous in the age of the internet might not even be possible without taking away everything noteworthy, so they require some form of consent nowadays.
That's not so easy, especially for clinical case studies. If any data points are irrelevant, they should not be stated at all, because they actually might not be irrelevant after all and by arbitrarily changing them, you could confound results. On the other hand, it has been shown that three or more indirect data points can already be enough to unmask you in an anonymized report. And most reports usually contain many more than that. So it's not surprising that journals would cover their backs by requiring consent, even if the law does not explicitly demand it.
It’s been known since at least the 90s that it’s really hard to fully anonymize patient records. You can’t be certain but you can infer probabilities from very little information.
I don’t know how typical it is, but HIPAA explicitly doesn’t cover patient data after anonymization, and anecdotally I’ve had an anonymous case study published about me without my consent (although I was notified after).
The NYT has no authority to dox people. If they or anyone believed that SSC was acting unethically or illegally, that should be processed through proper legal or ethical channels, which exist for a reason. The solution is not that NYT should abuse their power to skip those channels.
Yes, he had to distance himself from it because his audience turned out to be significantly more horrible than him and it was getting on his nerves. But he still holds significant sympathy towards race science views.
No, unfortunately they don't. Scott Alexander Siskind is definitely sympathetic to race science and neoreaction, that's WHY he wrote the "anti"-reactionary FAQ. It's probably the most popular document about "neoreaction" on the internet and made many many people more aware of neoreactionary ideas. He did this intentionally because he likes neoreactionaries and thinks they are correct about race science and that they're useful allies.
There is simply no other way to explain this email [0] that he wrote.
One critical point, he discusses "criticizing" the neoreactionaries, and says he disagrees with them on several points.
> I want to improve their thinking so that they become stronger and keep what is correct while throwing out the garbage. A reactionary movement that kept the high intellectual standard (which you seem to admit they have), the correct criticisms of class and of social justice, and few other things while dropping the monarchy-talk and the cathedral-talk and the traditional gender-talk and the feudalism-talk - would be really useful people to have around. So I criticize the monarchy-talk etc, and this seems to be working - as far as I can tell a lot of Reactionaries have quietly started talking about monarchy and feudalism a lot less (still haven't gotten many results about the Cathedral or traditional gender).
There are a "few other things" he thinks they're right about, but he specifically lists all four things that he thinks are problematic. None of them are race science, which implies that race science is one of the "few other things" he thinks they're correct about.
You can put this together with enough of his public writing to see where he stands on the issue. He's clearly aligned with "race realism".
This entire email is also accompanied by a threat never to reveal these thoughts of Scott's. Why? Because he knows that being outed for his real views would do serious damage to his reputation. That's also why he got mad at the NYT, because they had his number and he didn't want anyone to find out about his real politics.
If you're the kind of person who is naive enough to think "He wrote an anti-reactionary FAQ, how could he be a reactionary?", I am sorry, but you're dealing with a lying snake.
This one is more direct than most, but comments about the subject are not uncommon on the older blog. I think reading this material is why the journalist turned against him but never stated why. "Psychiatrist has dozens of charts on their secret personal blog comparing the achievements of different sub-ethnicities in Israel" is a headline you might try to hide out of politeness to the uninvolved.
What's wrong with comparing the achievements of different sub-ethnicities in Israel? What's wrong with talking about any real phenomena? Is the assumption that he must have a hidden bad-faith agenda?
It's against the current ruling dogma to question that human beings are interchangeable cogs that are all ready to be placed into the machine wherever needed.
> It's against the current ruling dogma to question that human beings are interchangeable cogs that are all ready to be placed into the machine wherever needed.
It’s because the machine is their god. Service to the machine provides your value, and by extension your right to exist. If someone is no longer capable of the serving the machine, they are discard. What that looks like exactly is not pretty
Some people are inherently incapable of proving more value to the machine than they consume. What is to be done with these “extra” people?
Who's they? The subset of politically correct types who reject the idea of universal human dignity and instead tie your moral worth to material output, but still keep insisting that everyone's equal? Honestly I don't think it's a large group.
This is a journalistic publication with a foundational value of transparency. If you study the history of institutions that favor transparency, they rarely ever need to further justify efforts of transparency beyond that underlying value. Transparency needs no further analysis of second order effects.
“What is gained…?” is simply not a question asked, for the same reason that advocates for privacy rarely if ever circumstantially ask the same question.
No one defending privacy is claiming situation like a pedophile keeping a slave children in their basement should be undetectable because privacy should be an absolute barrier that let people whatever atrocities they want within private doors.
On the other hand, those who seriously care about privacy won’t believe it’s fine to have some laws supposedly enacted to protect the children but actually just implement general presumption of guilt and everyone being spied permanently.
As someone currently working there (in tech, not the newsroom), this is partially correct.
Second order effects can become a consideration, but the bar is high. Usually “will this place someone in immediate, specific danger of harm” vs potential risks.
As a recent example, journalists covering Iran in the past week had sources confirming the downed airman was located, but that the extraction planes had been unable to take off, and held off on publication. Same for advance knowledge of the Maduro raid. Both examples have been confirmed publicly by those journalists.
Not defending this particular decision at the moment, but someone who potentially controls Satoshi’s wallet has much more ability to protect themselves, and their desire to remain anonymous wouldn’t factor in.
My mind goes to the science fiction novel Footfall by Larry Nivel and Jerry Pournell, in which Earth is attacked by aliens and, at one point, a journalist figures out about a secret project to carry out a counter-offensive and is going to run a story on it, obviously against the wishes of those involved with the project.
Another character drowns the journalist in a toilet.
I get that, but it's difficult to reconcile this with media's second principle of protecting/anonymizing sources. I don't think it's reasonable for them to have it both ways, especially when exposing an anonymous subject could result in physical danger.
> Transparency needs no further analysis of second order effects.
Everything needs analysis of second order effects. Otherwise you wreck lives without even realizing that's what you're doing. It's the negligence of a drunk driver.
On the other hand, this also applies to Bitcoin. Satoshi, if he is real and alive and in control of his wallet, is a billionaire. Billionaires need to be kept under careful watch unless they, too, wreck lives without realizing.
At least Adam Back is already publicly known to be worth at least tens of millions anywyas. Many of those dozens/hundreds of other guesses are not so lucky.
If the private key still exists, the BTC would be worth more like 10s of billions though. I choose to believe the key is long gone from this world though, whoever originally had it.
I was curious about this point when discussion came up on HN just recently. I don't see how you could "assign" each non-QR address a new quantum resistant address unless they "claim" it themselves somehow. What can possibly happen to an uneducated mom-and-pop bitcoin holder who never takes up their claim? Someone else who cracks their private key would be in an identical position to them w.r.t authenticating themselves and doing such a claim first - thus it becomes a race
That's not really what GP was saying, but since you brought it up I think it would actually be insane NOT to - otherwise Bitcoin has an extremely unstable period as 100s of billions of $ worth of locked up BTC becomes instantly fluid the moment the non-QR wallets are crackable.
I.e. it makes sense to have a long term planned migration of what's active rather than any type of instantaneous rush/change.
If I say that I think you are Satoshi, what are the ethical implications of that? Should I not speak or write opinions that you find annoying or inconvenient? How does that scale to everyone?
This is why the first item in the U.S. Bill of Rights is freedom of speech and of the press. Who knows what objections anyone will have to any given statement, and forcing everyone to accommodate everyone leads to a claustrophobic dystopia.
I always assumed these wallets were never meant to be withdrawn. In the case of satoshi’s - it’s public proof that the Bitcoin network is still secure.
> Bitcoins across old unused wallets worth $30B to $80B depend of how you count it.
It's worth considerably less if you make any attempt to count it accurately. The market capitalization reflects the fact that old unused wallets are unused. If they stopped being unused, market capitalization would drop.
I think what makes this a little murkier is that this Beck guy appears to be already a well known figure in crypto circles. (I don't really follow the space). It feels more like uncovering the secret director of a film to be an established film producer.
For the last point, I agree there's a sort of "who cares" aspect to the piece. There is no artistic intent to interpret. The product speaks for itself making BTC the default crypto coin instead of any of the other millions of coins. The wealth from the founder, from what I can tell, has not been instrumentalized in any significant way.
> I agree there's a sort of "who cares" aspect to the piece
Sure, rationally I agree, but clearly a lot of people do care. It may not matter in any substantive way who Satoshi is but people still care.
> There is no artistic intent to interpret
Is that the case? Obviously there is no artistic intent as bitcoin is not art, but it's not clear to me why the intent of an artist is important but the intent of a technologist is not.
You mean, why is it worth noting that someone who frequently speaks at conferences about Bitcoin, has businesses that utilise Bitcoin and is influential in the Bitcoin community is - the inventor of Bitcoin?
And the "evidence" they presented includes things like, body language.
> I presented my evidence piece by piece. In his soft British lilt, Mr. Back insisted he wasn’t Satoshi and chalked it all up to a series of coincidences. But at times, his body language told a different story. His face reddened and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat when confronted with things that were harder to explain away.
Yes, they unironically wrote this.
Everyone knows that if you already believe someone is lying, you'll see all the signs that he's lying. It's confirmation bias 101, and this is unashamedly published on a so-called credible journalism outlet.
I think if something bad happens to Mr. Back (I hope not), the NYTimes is at least morally responsible.
> this is unashamedly published on a so-called credible journalism outlet
There may be credible journalists at some major print newspapers, but I don’t think there are many people who actually believe that any major US-based journalism outlet defaults to credible any more.
Like most efforts to unmaks satoshi, the whole piece is a long exercise in confirmation bias. He pours over posts to find specific shared writing tics, then feeds those specific tics into an LLM to 'eliminate' other suspects? All because more unbiased approaches carried out by the academic were inconclusive.
I mean, yeah? We can wag our fingers about what people find interesting but it is what it is. Bitcoin is an important technology in the world, and people are interested in who the inventor is. You may think it doesn't matter, but clearly a lot of people disagree.
This one is challenging I think because the article itself is so thin. The evidence seems really shaky.
That said, clearly a lot of people really do seem to care who Satoshi is, so it doesn't seem like its out of the question for a newspaper to print an article claiming to answer that question.
> Do they just not care about the ethical implications?
Did Satoshi not care about the ethical implications of creating bitcoin? Mr Back may not be Satoshi, but he's also made a career driving the adoption of bitcoin and bitcoin itself has enabled many, many terrible crimes. It seems like special pleading to argue that Mr Back is not responsible for any of the consequence of bitcoin in the world, and also that the NY Times is morally responsible if someone harms Mr Back because they think he is Satoshi. Either we have an ethical responsibility to consider the consequences of our actions or we don't.
> Did Satoshi not care about the ethical implications of creating bitcoin? Mr Back may not be Satoshi, but he's also made a career driving the adoption of bitcoin and bitcoin itself has enabled many, many terrible crimes.
Nobody seems to be angry at the inventor of coins and bills, though.
Adam Back is already a high profile target. Unmasking him as Satoshi doesn't really change that for the guy that founded that company that leads bitcoin core development.
Naah, the moment the first million of those is sold -- the price crashes.
In other words, imagine some investor had those billions, and could buy the key. Should they? A thing is worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it.
They might crash the price if they sold the whole stake in one go, sure.
But I predict that modest selling would increase the bitcoin price. Just imagine the hype from the Second Coming of Satoshi. Bitcoin would be front page news in mainstream newspapers for that week.
I think of journalism like any other job where there's an expectation to produce results, where the main objective here is to write an article that lots of people read. It's a topic that catches a lot of people's attention, so in a sense they've succeeded by getting a lot of people to read and talk about it.
It’s like saying chirurgeon job is like any other job, and the most people operated in a minimum amount of time is all that matter to optimize. But even in the most cynical Machiavelli™ hospital, reputation and actual operational results have to be taken into account if the institution want to continue to be frequented.
Easy - they don't care. Major institutional publications have lacked journalistic integrity for a very long time now. I can't really think of any exceptions there anymore.
I think the wallets go well beyond "hundreds of millions". Aren't there like a million Bitcoin in dormant wallets associated with Satoshi? Personally, I'd assumed that whoever the person or persons were, they're dead because nobody can resist the pull of tens of billions of dollars regardless of their ideological position on cryptocurrencies. But that's just a guess.
There's absolutely a public interest in this. Sorry. This is a trillion dollar market now. Was this a state actor? If so, why? what was the plan here exactly? I see absolutely no reason to respect anonymity here. You don't get to sit on $50 billion and have people respect your desire to remain hidden.
More likely they were playing with the system when they were the system in the early days, and just didn't keep those keys (IMO). Remember, even into the GPU era people were still giving bitcoin away; those wallets weren't worth anything.
Which is why fining the owners of the wallets should be a huge deal: they can crash bitcoin whenever is most convenient for them.
It always baffles me that people have near religious faith in a Holy Satoshi that walks away from billions of dollars “for the sake of the game”.
If he’s really so unconcerned with money or fame, it would be far more interesting for him to build it up precisely to blow it down. That’s some cosmic coyote kind of behavior and that I will always get behind.
Why do you assume the original creator(s) still have the keys to those wallets? Wouldn't it be extremely unlikely that they didn't make use of them by now if that was the case? This is well beyond sell your soul money for most people.
> they can crash bitcoin whenever is most convenient for them.
I'm not so sure about this. Bitcoin thrives on vibes. The second coming of Satoshi (as evidence by control over his wallets), would surely drive a lot of Bitcoin hype.
An estimated 22,000 addresses, 1.1 million Bitcoin. Present value $78 billion. That would make him the 23rd richest person in the world. Bill Gates by comparison is 'only' worth $102 billion these days.
If you priced Gates backwards in gold, his $102 billion is about $13 billion two decades ago. He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.
Wait. Are you claiming that there's some sort of link between "Gates's relationship with financier Jeffrey Epstein started in 2011" and the Gates Foundation which launched in 2000 by merging with the Gates Sr. Foundation from all the way back in 1994?
Yes, "charitable work". I'm sure a foundation like that could make a good front for child trafficking. Not that Bill would ever do such a thing obviously, his common interests with that old rascal Jeff must have strictly included other things.
Are you asserting that the Gates Foundation was a front for sex trafficking? Or are you just saying shit because you think the memes are cute and will get you social media approval?
I assume you think you're adding some kind of value to the discussion, here. But who knows, maybe you just really fucking love malaria.
I'm not denying bill did improper sexual things. But I think his goal was to evade taxes, which Epstein likely helped out with. In return, bill was likely blackmailed for his access to Microsoft, which benefits Israel.
> He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.
The dollar is trading pretty much at 30-year historic highs relative to all other currencies. You have to go back to ~2000 to find a stronger era, and then the 1980s before that.
I don't know how you know that, but even that argument is a straw man, unless you're asserting that all of the other currencies declined in value equally against whatever theoretical good(s) you're holding out as the objective standard for value.
> He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.
You can't price dollars in gold to measure value. Gold doesn't measure value better than the dollar at any point in time, let alone over time. Just use the price index for one currency, or the relative price indexes across currencies.
I broadly agree with you, however: during the classic gold standard years, gold did have a pretty stable purchasing power (as eg measured by your favourite inflation index) in the long run.
However, since the world largely went off the gold standard, the purchasing power of gold has been a lot more volatile.
Hype would not cause a price increase in this case. The value of bitcoin is partly due to scarcity. 1.1m previously inaccessible bitcoins suddenly becoming liquid would cause a drop in price, even if they were sold slowly. It could also cause panic selling as it might indicate the wallets have been brute force cracked.
As a weaker point: I would expect an increase in the market capitalisation of the bitcoin float. Ie if you multiply the price of bitcoin by the amount of movable bitcoin right now and after the first Satoshi is sold, you compare with the new price of bitcoin multiplied by the newly enlarged amount of movable bitcoin.
The strong claim is that the price per bitcoin would go up, too. Not just the market cap of the float.
> It could also cause panic selling as it might indicate the wallets have been brute force cracked.
Suppose I brute force cracked it to get access to the bitcoins. I would:
Quietly amass a large offsetting position in the bitcoin futures market (and wherever else you can do this), before I make any moves. Then (assuming I couldn't hedge my whole exposure at decent prices) I would use all means available to pretend that Satoshi had woken up again. Eg use specially fine-tuned LLMs to mimic his style to post on the usual mailing list etc. Some people will believe you, some won't.
I'd say post a bit in Satoshi's name to build interest. Then skeptics will say: prove it. And you 'prove' it by selling moving a few Satoshis between your own wallets back and forth. (Don't sell anything yet.) The hype will build, and you sell into it on the futures market.
The last step is important, because you can get rid of your bitcoin exposure this way, without any trace on the blockchain. So you can even vow to never release any of the stash on the market and other shenanigans. That should help the price.
Well, the futures will come due eventually, and then you can move the stash. The price might or might not crash, but you don't care, because you already locked in your profits on the derivatives.
> Partially due to scarcity, but also due to hype.
I agree with you, but isn't the value of gold also almost entirely due to hype? Sure, there are some industrial applications, but those are minor components of demand for gold.
Hype is just another way of saying "people obtain pleasure from owning this thing" and that's pretty much what sets demand for most goods. Don't even get me started on diamonds. The whole wedding ring having a diamond is hype.
Bitcoin just makes this explicit and impossible to deny.
Well, there's pleasure from directly owning the thing: you can look at gold in your vault and appreciate it for itself.
But a bitcoin in your vault by itself is indistinguishable from a shitcoin I just made by forking bitcoin with the same code but a new genesis block. Or even more pointed: the alternative futures of bitcoins after any route not taken by the community after any hard fork.
In any case, I agree that much of the value of gold comes from social conventions, too, yes.
Gold is a weird one. It’s has a hell of a run over the last decade. I’m not sure it looked so rosy in 2015. I kinda feel like betting on gold is betting on the end of civilization. I don’t really want to be right.
I was thinking along the same lines. Isn't it just doxxing? Going deep into someone's online history and making hypothesis about who they are in real life, then publishing their name and what they do?
I fail to understand "why". There is this awesome band, Angine de Poitrine, that makes being anonymous a big part of the fun. Some people are trying hard to dox them, and I heard that someone already did it. What if they decide to quit, now that the fun is over if they are not anonymous anymore? Congrats, you fucked up the party and nothing was gained.
Let's keep in mind that doxxing is not a universal concept nor are its mechanisms universally perceived as negative/frowned upon outside of specific online areas.
I don't know of any law against it except for specific populations like law enforcement and even those usually have exceptions for journalism.
Yeah, as a Scandinavian it is often hard to understand how people can feel that their existence is a secret. We've had public and fairly rich (family relations, profession) census data for hundreds of years. Tax records, school grades, property ownership. All of it public information available to and for everyone.
The right to privacy here never meant "noone may know that I exist".
Widely only in limited — mostly english speaking — online communities. Otherwise most people hate it if it is likely to harm someone considered as an innocent individual but less if that figure is already kind of public — people love to know where and all the details on how famous people live — or to people they view more negatively. For instance nobody complains when the real owner, origin and location of say, a shady company, is made known to the general public.
I was replying purely to 'Oh really, there was a vote?'
Most places have votes every few years. And the elected representatives can generally make and amend or keep laws. The candidates can also generally make any promises they wish to make, and if the general public wants some specific laws changed, it's often a good idea for candidates to make that a part of their platform. And if people generally don't want a law changed, candidates tend to ignore them. Basic representative democracy stuff.
Exactly right. Unfortunately, this is likely a reporter who is just looking for something that will get attention. I remember a time when reporters wrote things based on importance, not chasing clickbait like everyone on social media. Whoever Satoshi is/was, they wanted privacy. Let them have it and move on.
The receiver will immediately move the bitcoin. So it has the same downside.
If the receiver doesn't immediately move the bitcoin, the receiver is at risk of Satoshi stealing them by retaining the private key and moving them later.
Even if the receiver trusts Satoshi, if the receiver wants to spend the bitcoin on anything, there's the same problem again.
You still have to pay the interest from somewhere. And presumably you'd need to put the coins into some kind of escrow so that the lender can get their money back even if you conveniently forget your private key.
In this case it's not basic stuff. You would need to prove that you own the actual bitcoin or transfer it for it to be collateral on a loan. It's the same as spending it.
You really dont get it? Because real billionares have the money and you dont.
Journalists just told everyone you are billionare, but you're just average SWE on $120k / year and absolutely no money for hiring small army of guards. Neither your own government agencies keep your back protected like they do for usual high profile people.
Now go find a proof for mafia that you are not in fact have a billion bucks on USD stick.
This has happened in this Satoshi hunt multiple times already. I mean finding that some random crypto related SWE is Satoshi when they are not.
> you're just average SWE on $120k / year and absolutely no money for hiring small army of guards
FWIW, in this instance Adam Back is also a non-secret billionaire, mostly from his public involvement in a number of ventures within the Bitcoin ecosystem. The difference is closer to 1 order of magnitude than the 4 you're proposing.
You are right, but this is not the first investigation.
Also there is massive difference between being rich, or even a super rich and literally hidding $50B under your bedsheet on USB stick.
No one expects that putting a gun to even a super rich person head will buy you a small country. You can kill a billionare, but you cant extract much value out of it other than $100k on their credit card and $500k watch neither of which you can really sell.
Havimg keys to $50B on USB stick is different level of danger.
Satoshi is a paper billionaire - he can't use a small fraction of his "wealth" to hire proper security. Simultaneously his "assets" are much more attractive to criminals. Imagine holding a regular billionaire hostage and demanding they give you a billion dollars. They'd probably have to sell 1B worth of stock, then convert it to cash (or crypto), etc. all of that requiring multiple interactions with different people and institutions.
Heisting multiple billions worth of crypto would have the same issues, just to a smaller degree. If that much illicit money is on the line, `mJurisdiction` which normally looks the other way might be tempted to investigate and confiscate it for their own benefit.
They also can't easily sell that amount quickly without repercussions (and without another institution like an exchange).
>> And really, for what? What is gained by “unmasking” Satoshi other than satisfying one’s curiosity? There is no argument to be made there for the greater public good or anything like that.
Sure there is. A whole system of unregulated finance has been setup and it's very useful for criminality. How is not in the public interest to know who set it up and for what purpose? If it turned out Satoshi was actually a nation state and this was done for some nefarious purpose you think that's not in the public interest?
By definition, if they’re not concerned about the ethics, they are not journalists and their occupation is not journalism. Nor does your employer’s reputation[1] allow them to claim such titles simple because they sign your pay cheque. You can’t inherit the title like that.
Journalist/journalism is like leader/leadership… too often used inappropriately, too often used to mislead, too often used inappropriately. Words such as reporter, hack, or NYT agent are more appropriate and more accurate.
Put another way, if your pet barks, would you still call it a cat? Of course not! If these people and entities aren’t fulfilling the baseline of the definition why do we continue to call them something they are not?
Journalist is a verb. It’s the decisions made and the actions taken. We’d be doing the collective a favor if we stopped giving credit where credit is NOT due.
[1] editorial: Most of us would agree that the NYT has lost its way. That it’s getting by on the fumes of integrity long gone.
No. But people without ethics, transparency, etc can not be. Again, for all intents and purposes it’s a verb. It’s the actions you take. This thread is filled with references to actions that DQ the person from being a journalist. Continuing to get them the title / reward only encourages bad behavior.
Morally, that's a valid position to take. Pragmatically, I'd call every human who writes for a newspaper like the NYT a 'journalist'.
(Of course, we could extend the same game and deny the moniker of 'newspaper' for a rag like that. But at some point, we are drifting too far from the mainstream accepted definition of words.)
> Then the person who harmed him will be prosecuted ... NY Times isn’t calling for violence.
And the negligent driver also didn't mean to cause injury, yet we have laws on negligent driving.
If the NY Times would have known that harm could come to someone by having information published, they should consult and/or take measures to prevent that harm (or at least, take measures to minimize it).
The negligent driver was driving the vehicle though. The NY Times writer isn’t holding Back hostage and holding a knife to his throat nor indicating anyone should do that. Your metaphor is nonsense.
Consider the following hypothetical: you have a safe in your home with a substantial sum of money in it, and you consider its presence, the location and contents private knowledge. However, someone uses publicly available information to infer the rough location and contents of your safe and makes it public. You are robbed shortly after. What percentage of responsibility lies with that person?
Responsibility is entirely your own fault for letting the “someone” know of your safe and it’s value. Do you know in America most gun safes are kept unlocked? Most gun safes are rather large too, hard to hide. Why doesn’t chaos ensue when this fact is known? Someone COULD go an steal all the guns and use the guns to kill everyone then rob everyone. But do you think they’d get away clean and no one would have any idea what’s going on? It could happen but hasn’t yet.
It’s another day, why hasn’t some nut captured Back yet and done any of the fearful things you’re insinuating yet?
In fact why didn’t someone just kidnap and torture ALL of the possible Satoshis? The names have been known for quite some time. I’m sorry but your theory that revealing who Satoshi is, is bad doesn’t hold water.
Alternatively, you don't even have that money, the journalists hallucinated the whole thing, so when the home invader breaks in and starts torturing you, there's literally nothing you can do to save yourself as they cut off pieces of you little by little.
But don't worry, they'll definitely solve this crime, because the clearance rate for impersonal crimes that don't involve family, friends or business associates is famously high. ...oh wait.
What? They murdered me then stole my money. I’m dead before I knew I was robbed so in your scenario I can’t die knowing the thief would be prosecuted, because I’m already dead. I literally dont care what happens then because I have no agency at that point in time.
Harm from exposure can take a lot of shapes and sizes that go beyond the physical and the potential prosecution that someone may be held accountable I find weak.
Why should journalism engage in the implied pro-active censorship here?
With that reasoning you could censor everything, including the Epstein files. You only need to find some "critical reason", usually being safety concern or "but but but the children". So I disagree with that rationale.
How far would you want censorship to go?
Having said that, I am not particularly interested in the "who is mystery man" debate situation.
> There is no argument to be made there for the greater public good
That's an opinion. While I personally don't care, others may, so your statement here is also just an opinion. Trump also said the Epstein files are not relevant - I and many others think differently. I wonder how deep the Epstein kompromat situation is, it would be an ideal blackmail situation. Any democracy can be factually undermined that way.
> Because in this particular case it endangers subject's life.
This seems like a stretch. Mr Back is already a well-known wealthy person who (presumably) owns lots of crypto. I think it's a stretch to think this article significantly increase the danger to his life.
Lol you guys are really in a cult aren’t you? You’re implying that journalists should never out people that are too wealthy? Do you not see the massive red flag here?
It’s the logical conclusion to his statement, why should Satoshi be treated differently, given more privacy rights, only because he’s a billionaire? Or do you think that making an exception for him is the logical choice here?
I don't have anything to add that isn't already argued in other comments in this thread. I'm just pointing out that your opinions are not logical derivations.
Journalists largely have no morals or ethics these days. Literal scum of the earth, anything to make a name for themselves or to push their ideological agendas.
> There is no argument to be made there for the greater public good or anything like that.
Here is an argument for the greater public good.
Transparency. Bitcoin acts as an alternative global monetary system. It’s not centralized but whales can control the game. Acquisition of bitcoins are asymmetrical, meaning first adopters gained an enormous wealth and became whales virtually for free. So we can say it’s a rigged game. It becomes important to know who are all those people that can control a global monetary system. If Satoshi is an individual it may not matter. But what if it’s an organization, like CIA or o group of bankers. What if it was Epstein or Elon Musk, unlikely but viable candidates but the implications are huge.
Also we assume Bitcoin is for good and maker of a good thing can be anonymous. What if it is a harmful thing, like a Ponzi scheme to grab people’s money. Then Satoshi becomes a criminal rather than a hero, and public must know the name.
I would assume that they don't care about the unmasking, because the whole thing is a just a misleading show, intended to misdirect you from the reality. I don't know the reality, but perhaps if the USG was behind the creation of BTC, that would explain it.
NYT just doesn't care about the consequences of what they publish. A few years ago they put out a piece about how a big group of people were constantly raping another big group of people, that had significant geopolitical implications, it turned out to be entirely made up and they never apologised.
No, because those people are already public figures. They own companies that are publicly known (i don't mean publicly traded), and thus by proxy, are public face of those companies.
Or they appear(ed) in public to make something of being in public (such as lobbying, or civic activities, or philanthropy etc). This makes any article about them not a doxx - they already revealed themselves publicly. You cannot segregate public affairs of the person with private affairs.
Mr Back is already a very public figure in the bitcoin/crypto community who is the face of a public company. This isn't some rando who nobody has ever heard of before.
Those people are on alert and already protected. Satoshi is probably a regular guy without any other security other than being anonymous. We are also assuming that they are doxing the real guy, and not some bystander that now have to deal with all the consequences without having the resources to protect himself. Lets suppose they are wrong, they dox the wrong person, "opsies, let us add a footnote to the text saying we were wrong, and let us forget this happened" (RE: reddit played detective a couple times and botched normal people lives).
And if you do have a big pile of money but are flying under the radar so far you sadly should have some investments in security. I thought people around here didn’t really believe in security through obscurity.
Lets keep with the analogy, as wrong as it is. If you discover a serious bug, you usually disclose it privately, allowing the maintainers to patch the problem before disclosing. When the embargo is over, the bug is already harmless. Why we do that? Isn't that security through obscurity? Why we consider unethical to just disclose serious zero day bugs that might even get someone killed, or thousand of script kiddies that would never discover the bug on their own can profit from it easily?
Security through obscurity actually works in real life. There are lots of people that hide all their lives in a humble way, only to get discovered as millionaires after they die. Because you don't have hundred, thousands of bots looking for "vulnerabilities" on everyone's life at almost zero cost and big potential profit.
Who says he has the money? Even if he really is who they say he is, why do you think he actually has that money? It hasn't moved since it was made, it was probably casually lost during testing and will never be recovered by anybody, meaning it basically doesn't exist at all.
Sadly it does. Most of those people have to spend a lot of money on security. But usually it's not the Forbes list that specifically outs them as being wealthy. You can't really build a billion dollar company under the radar.
This is just a strange situation where someone has made billions without their identity being known, without being a criminal.
After events of last 4 years in Russia you can probably be killed there for $100 or for a wrong look. Lots of trigger happy ex-convict veterans with PTSD are around.
For now they are busy killing their wives and relatives, but eventually they will run out of money for alcohol and will have to find a "job".
Satoshi’s wallets are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and there have been kidnappings/torture/murders for much less than that.
Do they just not care about the ethical implications?
And really, for what? What is gained by “unmasking” Satoshi other than satisfying one’s curiosity? There is no argument to be made there for the greater public good or anything like that.