The Face Behind Bitcoin

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This is the face behind bitcoin? You could have fooled me. After the events of the past two weeks, this is the true face behind bitcoin. :D

"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." Nakamoto refused to say any more, and the police made it clear our conversation was over.
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"I don't think he's in any trouble," I say. "I would like to ask him about Bitcoin. This man is Satoshi Nakamoto."

"What?" The police officer balks. "This is the guy who created Bitcoin? It looks like he's living a pretty humble life."
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Yeah, most police officers know the nom de plume of a cryptocurrency founder, and the first thing they're going to comment on is his "humble life."

I call bullshit.
 
Kritter said:
Can't see anything through this pay wall.
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I skimmed part of the article, so I'll sum it up for you:

"I found this guy's name and started stalking the fuck out of him and harassing his family."

Follow that up with a lot of creative writing to fill in the gaps.
 
This guy has been on the list of potentials for years, not even in the top 5 candidates. My money is on Nick Szabo personally.

Attention whore fail.
 
Seems like about the kind of paranoid introvert you'd expect to create something like this.
 
On the one hand Newsweek dismisses bitcoin:

"Even so, Bitcoin is vulnerable to massive theft, fraud and scandal, which has seen the price of Bitcoins whipsaw from more than $1,200 each last year to as little as $130 in late February."

Ok then why go to any length to find the founder of cryptographic money? Unless it really is a big deal? And you are a disinformation news outlet?:D
 
Reading the Verge article on this, it didn't surprise me to read that this guy had a history of "classified work for major corporations and the US military".

What puzzles me is if he "kept his work on Bitcoin secret even from his family" then why the following.. "In addition to interviews with family and friends, reporter Leah McGrath Goodman cites a single face-to-face interaction with Nakamoto.. Goodman appears to have spoken to Nakamoto only briefly, though she cites longer interviews with his siblings and children." If this guy kept this all a secret, why interview friends and family?? What could they say except.."yeah, the guy was on the computer a lot!"

John Titor never mentioned Bitcoin.. if it was going to be so big in the future, you would have thought he would have! :D

More importantly.. where do you buy these ACTUAL Bitcoin coins.. most articles about Bitcoin show some variation of the coins shown below..

largest_bitcoin_exchange_suspends_withdrawals_si.jpg
 
Those coins were made by some marketplace (like Gox) and contain a chip in it with the "code" for an offline bitcoin. I wouldn't trust them but they make a good image.
 
mo' money, mo' problems.

I can see why he wanted to be anonymous. The IRS will probably want to speak with him very soon.
 
I've always assumed it was a pseudonym.

Hopefully its really him so we can criticize his personal life, an entire new proxy of bitcoin hate, equally rational to the rest.
 
aardvark sandwich said:
When you go through about a year of being called a heroin dealer and pedophile by half of everyone you know, it gets old quick.
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never happened to me, but people know me as just a computer nerd that does things for shits and giggles.
 
If this is actually the guy in question, taking a picture of his house while not bothering to Photoshop out the license plate... to a guy that's worth half a billion dollars, and has no private security is beyond irresponsible.

Also, the "article" read like a grammatically correct forum post, not exactly the standard that I would expect from a publication such as Newsweek.
 
Pringle said:
You bit-coin folk are a touchy bunch
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The world is closing in on Bitcoin, there is potential for it to get really ugly for the people who have sold them. Most of these people don't deserve to be treated like criminals and they should be concerned.

There's also the fact that most cults think they're being persecuted, often they actually are.
 
due process and freedom of association have been on the fence awhile now.
 
Twisted Kidney said:
There's also the fact that most cults think they're being persecuted, often they actually are.
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Yeah! All you Bitcoin users are a fucking CULT!

What? Why are you so touchy? Only some of you deserve to be treated like criminals!

Lotta fucking assholes on this board. Seriously.
 
Kritter said:
Can't see anything through this pay wall.
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"...the trail followed by Newsweek led to a 64-year-old Japanese-American man whose name really is Satoshi Nakamoto. 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...

...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...

...Two weeks before our meeting in Temple City, I struck up an email correspondence with Satoshi Nakamoto, mostly discussing his interest in upgrading and modifying model steam trains with computer-aided design technologies. I obtained Nakamoto's email through a company he buys model trains from.

He has been buying train parts from Japan and England since he was a teenager, saying, "I do machining myself, manual lathe, mill, surface grinders."

The process also requires a good amount of math, something at which Nakamoto - and his entire family - excels. The eldest of three brothers who all work in engineering and technical fields, Nakamoto graduated from California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, Calif., with a degree in physics. But unlike his brothers, his circuitous career path is very hard to trace...

..."You want to know about my amazing physicist brother?" says Arthur Nakamoto, Satoshi Nakamoto's youngest sibling, who works as director of quality assurance at Wavestream Corp., a maker of radio frequency amplifiers in San Dimas, Calif.

"He's a brilliant man. I'm just a humble engineer. He's very focused and eclectic in his way of thinking. Smart, intelligent, mathematics, engineering, computers. You name it, he can do it."

But he also had a warning.

"My brother is an asshole. What you don't know about him is that he's worked on classified stuff. His life was a complete blank for a while. You're not going to be able to get to him. He'll deny everything. He'll never admit to starting Bitcoin."

And with that, Nakamoto's brother hung up...

..."He was the kind of person who, if you made an honest mistake, he might call you an idiot and never speak to you again," Andresen says. "Back then, it was not clear that creating Bitcoin might be a legal thing to do. He went to great lengths to protect his anonymity."...

..."I got the impression that Satoshi was really doing it for political reasons," says Andresen... He doesn't like the system we have today and wanted a different one that would be more equal. He did not like the notion of banks and bankers getting wealthy just because they hold the keys," says Andresen...

..."I wish you wouldn't keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure," Nakamoto wrote to Andresen. "The press just turns that into a pirate currency angle. Maybe instead make it about the open source project and give more credit to your dev contributors; it helps motivate them."

Andresen responded: "Yeah, I'm not happy with the 'wacky pirate money' tone, either."

Then he told Nakamoto he'd accepted an invitation to speak at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters. "I hope that by talking directly to them and, more importantly, listening to their questions/concerns, they will think of Bitcoin the way I do - as a just-plain-better, more efficient, less-subject-to-political-whims money," he said. "Not as an all-powerful black-market tool that will be used by anarchists to overthrow the System."

From that moment, Satoshi Nakamoto stopped responding to emails and dropped off the map...

...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.

For the past 40 years, Satoshi Nakamoto has not used his birth name in his daily life. At the age of 23, after graduating from California State Polytechnic University, he changed his name to "Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto," according to records filed with the U.S. District Court of Los Angeles in 1973. Since then, he has not used the name Satoshi but instead signs his name "Dorian S. Nakamoto."

Descended from Samurai and the son of a Buddhist priest, Nakamoto was born in July 1949 in the city of Beppu, Japan, where he was brought up poor in the Buddhist tradition by his mother, Akiko...

...Just after graduating college, Nakamoto went to work on defense and electronics communications for Hughes Aircraft in southern California. "That was just the beginning," says Arthur, who also worked at Hughes. "He is the only person I have ever known to show up for a job interview and tell the interviewer he's an idiot - and then prove it."..

..."We were doing defensive electronics and communications for the military, government aircraft and warships, but it was classified and I can't really talk about it," confirms David Micha, president of the company now called L-3 Communications...

...Nakamoto, who was laid off twice in the 1990s, according to Mitchell, fell behind on mortgage payments and taxes and their home was foreclosed. That experience, says Nakamoto's oldest daughter, Ilene Mitchell, 26, may have informed her father's attitude toward banks and the government...

...Andresen concurs: "Satoshi's style of writing code was old-school. He used things like reverse Polish notation."...

Reverse Polish Notation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation

..."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..."

..."Mitchell suspects Nakamoto's initial interest in creating a digital currency that could be used anywhere in the world may have stemmed from his frustration with bank fees and high exchange rates when he was sending international wires to England to buy model trains. "He would always complain about that," she says..."

..."Satoshi Nakamoto's three-year silence also dovetails with health issues suffered by Dorian S. Nakamoto in the past few years, his family says. "It has been hard, because he suffered a stroke several months ago and before that he was dealing with prostate cancer," says his wife, who works as a critical-care nurse in New Jersey. "He hasn't seen his kids for the past few years."...
 
Nobody with two brain cells to rub together is going to publish a document outlining an anonymous decentralized currency in their own name.
 
Seems like every day that passes, another negative event occurs connected with Bitcoin and another negative story about Bitcoin is published. I love it. I really hope Bitcoin is in a death spiral. :D
 
Stiletto said:
Yeah! All you Bitcoin users are a fucking CULT!

What? Why are you so touchy? Only some of you deserve to be treated like criminals!

Lotta fucking assholes on this board. Seriously.
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Congratulations...you just proved his point.
 
avddreamr said:
If this is actually the guy in question, taking a picture of his house while not bothering to Photoshop out the license plate... to a guy that's worth half a billion dollars, and has no private security is beyond irresponsible.

Also, the "article" read like a grammatically correct forum post, not exactly the standard that I would expect from a publication such as Newsweek.
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Yeah, the lady is a nutcase and this isnt even the right guy. Just a little story she made up after find a S. Nakamoto in a phone book. As if this guy hasnt been seen a thousand times by people looking for the "real" Satoshi Nakamoto?
 
qdemn7 said:
Seems like every day that passes, another negative event occurs connected with Bitcoin and another negative story about Bitcoin is published. I love it. I really hope Bitcoin is in a death spiral. :D
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Because big banks need all the help they can get and should not be forced to compete?

Or because the US government has the moral right to impose a competition-free currency to its subjects?
 
During lunch today, I was watching a Bitcoin discussion on MSNBC and some suit said that there are new wallets being developed that will be unhackable in two years, which will then make Bitcoin acceptable by the masses. Wonder how good that guy's crystal ball is!!

images_q_tbn_ANd9_Gc_Qt_K0_Zmt3z_T4_M1_B279_UHGisaop_OB5p.jpg
 
qdemn7 said:
Seems like every day that passes, another negative event occurs connected with Bitcoin and another negative story about Bitcoin is published. I love it. I really hope Bitcoin is in a death spiral. :D
Click to expand...

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