Should Newsweek Have Outed Satoshi Nakamoto's Personal Details?

Nerval's Lobster writes "Newsweek's Leah McGrath Goodman spent months tracking down the mysterious founder of Bitcoin, "Satoshi Nakamoto," a name that everybody seemed to believe was a pseudonym for either a single individual or a shadowy collective of programmers. If Satoshi Nakamoto, former government contractor and model-train enthusiast, is actually "Satoshi Nakamoto," Bitcoin founder, then he's sitting atop hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto-currency. Does the article's exhaustive listing of Nakamoto's personal details place his security at risk? Many in the Bitcoin community think so, and poured onto the Web to express that opinion. The Newsweek article has raised some interesting questions about the need for thorough journalism versus peoples' right to privacy. For example, should Goodman have posted an image of Nakamoto's house and car, even though information about both would probably be relatively simple to find online, anyway?"

Considering that the story is apparently wrong

[_xeno_]

Considering that apparently they didn't actually discover the "real" Satoshi Nakamoto after all [arstechnica.com], I'd have to go with "no, they shouldn't have revealed anything."

Bad

[The Cat]

It's just bad journalism all around. There's nothing newsworthy about chasing people around their front yard and ringing their doorbell at all hours.

Journalists used to have a little class.

Re:But He Isn't

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the main thing that makes you think he isn't the BitCoin creator?

Satoshi "Bitcoin" Nakamoto was a computer scientist experienced in publishing scientific papers. He was a native English speaker with a flawless control of his writing, mixing at will American and British English to confuse his trackers. Satoshi "Old crazy dude" Nakamoto has not published anything in his life and the quotes and alleged online profiles he created for himself reveal a tenuous grasp of the English language.

Satoshi "Bitcoin" Nakamoto wrote on the first try a very complex cryptographic application in C++ that turned out to have only a handful of security bugs. We have no ideea if "Old crazy dude" can even write code, let alone of this quality.

There is basically:
  - no publication history
  - no proven experience in writing crypto code (let's handwave that by saying he worked for "the military")

What we do have is him believing he is Satoshi Bitcoin Nakamoto and declaring it to a journalist, i.e proof he is a old crazy guy.

Re:But He Isn't

[darkain]

No real way to verify it, but there is a surefire way to discredit it!

https://twitter.com/mikko/stat... [twitter.com]

Re:But He Isn't

[guises]

Newsweek has already provided plenty of evidence. They haven't provided proof, that's not the same thing, but there is more than sufficient evidence to believe that this is the right guy.