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Reddit's Satoshi Nakamoto Skeptics
- waylandsmithers 13y agoI'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.
- exo762 13y ago> "no paper, copper, or silver—just thirty-one lines of code" Joshua Davis is incompetent. Maria Bustillos is incompetent too.
- wikiburner 13y agoYou forgot Gary Marcus. I don't know why anyone would look to the New Yorker for tech coverage.
- adamnemecek 13y agoI can't get over the fact that the New Yorker is quoting some reddit users using their online nicknames.
- krick 13y agoYou'd prefer their passport names? Would you quote Satoshi Nakamoto using his real name?
- adamnemecek 13y agoIt's that I find it entertaining more than anything.
- lostlogin 13y agoI know you've clarified your view below, but there are plenty of people who I know only by their online nickname. Stage names are accepted as normal and no one bats an eyelid - Reginald Dwight is a great example of this. There are plenty around however.
- kordless 13y agoI've been referred to by my nick for over 30 years, so yeah, it's a totally legitimate handle for referring to me. That said, it also points out I'm pushing gooter status.
- alexmat 13y agoAt 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.
- adamnemecek 13y agoI mean it's probably the same for me (idk I never really counted) but I still find it strange when pretty reputable news outlets do it.
- scoofy 13y agoI'm a mod on a few reasonably sized reddit subs, and yea, i would have no idea who anyone was by their real name. We are living in a transitional time for media to say the least. I wouldn't be surprised if media, by which i mean reporting style, 50 years from now barely resembles the old guard of today.
- XorNot 13y agoI 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.
- qdog 13y agoI can't get over the fact people keep printing articles without adding anything to the mix. Assuming the Satoshi Nakamoto identified is not the Satoshi Nakamoto who invented bitcoin, you'd think they'd try and get some formal writing with an FOI request or something to solidify the writing analysis instead of relying on postings to model train forums.
- kmfrk 13y agoThe New Yorker's tech writing has already been really weird when George Packer isn't in the byline.
- pyalot2 13y agoI know right. Edit: jep, that's me they're quoting.
- girvo 13y agoIn 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 13y agoIt's properly "Film at 11": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_at_11 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_at_11
- jnbiche 13y agoMaybe, but "News at 11" was definitely part of local stations' vocabulary when I was growing up.
- spdub 13y agoI 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 13y agoThat is what rel='nofollow' was invented for.
- devindotcom 13y agoInteresting 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 13y agoNew 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.
- maxerickson 13y agoI think it useful for the writers relationship with their audience to treat the online thing at arms length. It doesn't make the piece more interesting, but it helps accomplish the writers goal of getting it read.
- flylib 13y agoanyone 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_davis http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/10/111010fa_fact_... I love how they are trying to play dumb now when they were the ones that originally crossed the lines.
- martey 13y agoThat 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 13y agoit 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.
- JumpCrisscross 13y ago>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 13y agoHenry 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."
- nl 13y agoI 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 13y agoSorry, 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 13y agoI'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 13y agoI'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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- gtirloni 13y agoIs 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).
- d0ugie 13y agoI 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.