Satoshi: Why Newsweek isn’t convincing
By Felix Salmon
I had a 2-hour phone conversation with Leah McGrath Goodman yesterday. Goodman wrote the now-notorious Newsweek cover story about Dorian Nakamoto, which purported to out him as the inventor of bitcoin. At this point, it’s pretty obvious that the world is not convinced: in that sense, the story did not do its job.
As Anil Dash says, the geek world is the most skeptical. Almost all of the critiques and notations attempting to show that Dorian is not Satoshi are coming from geeks, which makes sense. If the world is what you perceive the world to be, then there is almost no overlap between the world of geeks in general, and bitcoin geeks in particular, on the one hand, and the world of a magazine editor like Jim Impoco, on the other hand. As a result, there’s a lot of mutual incomprehension going on here, which has resulted in an unnecessarily adversarial level of aggression.
As befits a debate which is centered on bitcoin, a lot of the incomprehension comes down to trust and faith. Bitcoin is a protocol which requires faith in no individual, institution, or state — all you need to believe in is cryptography. Dorian Nakamoto could have told Goodman explicitly that yes, he invented bitcoin — and still a lot of the bitcoin faithful would not be fully convinced unless and until Dorian proved that assertion cryptographically.
Goodman, on the other hand, is a proud journalist, who gets personally offended whenever anybody raises questions about her journalism, her techniques, or her reporting. In a reporter’s career, she says, “you check facts, you are building trust and building a reputation”. Goodman feels that her own personal reputation, combined with the institutional reputation of Newsweek, should count for something — that if Newsweek and Goodman stand behind a story, then the rest of us should assume that they have good reason to do so. There’s no doubt that a huge amount of work went into reporting this story, very little of which is actually visible in the magazine article itself.
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