Satoshi: Why Newsweek isntconvincing

I had a 2hour phone conversation with Leah McGrath Goodman yesterday. Goodman wrote the nownotorious Newsweek cover story about Dorian Nakamoto, which purported to out him as the inventor of bitcoin. At this point, its pretty obvious thattheworldisnotconvinced:in thatsense,thestorydidnotdoitsjob. 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 theother hand.Asaresult,theresalotof 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. DorianNakamoto couldhavetoldGoodman explicitly that yes, he invented bitcoin and still a lot of the bitcoin faithful would not be fully convinced unless anduntilDorianprovedthatassertioncryptographically. 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 reporters 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 standbehindastory,thentherestofusshould

assume that they have good reason to do so. Theres no doubt that a huge amount of work went intoreportingthis story, very littleofwhichis actuallyvisible inthemagazine articleitself. In aggregate, says Goodman, an enormous amount of evidence, including evidence which is not public, persuaded her that Dorian Nakamoto was her man. Goodman has not decided whether or how she might publish that evidence. When sheappearedonBloomberg TV, she said that she would love for people to look at the forensic research and the public evidence inthecase but, talking to me, she made it clear that she didnt consider it her job to helpoutotherjournalistsbypointing them to that evidence. Whats more, she also made it clear that she was in possession of evidence which other journalistscouldnotobtain. In other words, Goodman spent two months following leads and gathering evidence, both public and private. Eventually after confronting Dorian Nakamoto in person, and getting what she considered to be a confirmation from him, both she and her editors felt that

she was able to say, on the frontcoverofNewsweek,that he was the guy. The article itself was the culmination of that process, but it did not could not contain every last piece of evidence, both positive and negative, public and private, about both Dorian Nakamoto and every other candidate she looked at. The result is not the process, and Goodman feels that she should be given the respect due a serious and reputable investigative journalist, workingforaseriousandreputablepublication. Newsweek, its fair to say, has not been getting that respect, although it has been getting a lot more attention than most purelydigital publications would have received had they published the same story. Jim Impoco,cornered at a SXSW party,saidthathefindscriticismofhisstoryto be phenomenally offensive, and then went on to make the highly illadvised remark that we eliminated every other possible person. But thats really a messaging failure: he was on the back foot (SXSW is, after all, geek HQ this week,andthe geeks aregunningforImpocoright now). Clearly, this was not the time or the place for a considereddiscussionofevidentiarystandards.

That said, both Impoco and Goodman should have been smarter about how they talked about the story, postpublication. Both have been largely absent from Twitter and Reddit and RapGenius and other online placeswherethedebateisplayingoutinstead,theyhave been givinginterviewstomainstreammediaorganizations, which are often unhelpful. TV interviews devolve into stupid fights interviews with print or online journalists resultinjustacoupleofquotes. Goodman spent a lot of time, with me, walking me through her journalistic technique: she started, for instance, by trying to track down the person who initially registered the bitcoin.org domain name, and then followed various threads from there. And yes, she did consider and reject the individuals who are considered more likelycandidatesby thegeeksquad.NickSzabo,for instance, might well look like a good candidate if youre looking only at the original bitcoin paper, and asking who is most likely to have written such a thing. But when she looked at Szabos personal life, nothing lined up with what she knew about Satoshi Nakamoto and his

communications. Instead, shefoundtheDorianNakamoto lead and didnt think much of it, at first. But the more she kept trying to dismissit, and failingtodoso,themore she wondered whether Dorians very invisibility contextual silence, she called it might notbesending heramessage. Towards the end of Goodmans investigation, when she was preparing to try to meet with Dorian Nakamoto in person, Goodman told Impoco that if it didnt turn out to be Dorian, then weve got nobody. Thats what Impoco was most likely talking about, when he talked about eliminating people. Goodman and Impoco, more recently was just saying that this was her last open thread, and that if Dorian didnt pan out as the guy, then theydidnthaveastory. From my perspective, then, theres a big disconnect between what I now know about Goodmans methodology, on the one hand, and how that methodology is generally perceived by the people talking about her story on the internet, on the other. With hindsight, I think that Goodmans story would have

elicited much less derision if she had framed it as a firstperson narrative, telling the story of how she and her team found Dorian and were persuaded that he was their man. The story would surely have been more persuasive if she had gone into much more detail about the many dead ends she encountered along the way. The fateful quote would then have come at the end of the story, acting as a final datapoint confirming everything that the team had laboriously put together, rather than coming at thebeginning,outoftheblue. That storytelling technique would not persuade everybody, of course: nothing would, or could. And, more importantly, it isnt really what Impoco was looking for. Even the piece as it currently stands was cut back a few times: the final version was pared to its absolute essentials, and, like all longform magazine journalists, Goodman wishes that she might have had more space to tellafullerstory. But heres where one of the main areas of mutual incomprehension comes into play. Impoco and Goodman are mainstreammedia journalists producing mainstream

content for a mass audience Goodmans article was probably already pushing the limits of what Impoco felt comfortable with, given that he couldnt reasonably assume that most of his readers had even heard of bitcoin. Impoco was interested in creating a splashy magazine article, for the print reincarnation of a storied massmarket newsweekly. Of course, seeing as how this is 2014, the article would appear online, and would reach the people who care a lot about bitcoin, who were sure to make a lot of noise about it. But they werent the main audience that Impoco was aiming for. Indeed, in early 2012, when Impoco was editing a much smallercirculation magazine for Reuters, I sent him a draft ofwhatultimatelybecame thisarticleforMedium.He passed: it was too long, too geeky. Even if it would end up reaching a large audience online (it has had over 200,000 page views on Medium), it didnt have broad enoughappealtomakeitintoamagazine. Similarly, while Goodman has done a lot of press around her article, most of it looks like a tactical attempt to reach the greatest number of people, and build the most buzz

for her article. So shes been talking toalotofjournalists, especially on TV, while engaging relatively little on a direct basis with her online critics. Theres no shortage of substantive criticism of Goodmans article online, and of course there is no shortage of venues including, but not limited to, Newsweek.com where Goodman could respondtothatcriticism directly,wereshesoinclined.But instead shehasdecidedinlargepartnottojointheonline debate, and instead is ponderingwhetherornottowritea selfcontained followup article whichmightaddresssome ofthecriticism. Theres a good chance that followup article will never come, and that Goodman will simply cede this story to others. And you cant necessarily blame her, given how vicious and personal much of the criticism has been, and given how many of her critics seem to have made their minds up already, and will never be persuadable. Goodman has said her piece, andtherearesurelygreatly diminishingreturnstosayingagreatdealmore. Still, its just as easy to sympathize with the frustration being felt by the geeks. Appeals to authority dont work

well on this crowd and neither should they. If the US government can lie abouttheevidenceshowingthatthere were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, its hard to have much faith in an institution which, 18 months ago, slapped HEAVEN IS REAL all over its cover.(Thatstory, interestingly enough, was demolished by another massmarketmagazine,Esquire.) Indeed, both sides here havegoodreasontofeelsuperior to the other. From Newsweeks point of view, a small amount of smart criticism online has been dwarfed by a wave of namecalling, inchoate anger, and terrifying threats of physical violence. And from what youmightcall the internets point of view, Newsweek is demonstrating a breathtaking arrogance in simply dropping this theory on the world and presenting it, tied up in a bow, as some kindoffaitaccompli. The bitcoin community is just that a community and while there have been many theories as to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, those theories have always been tested in the first instance within the community. Bitcoin, as a population, includes a lot of highlyintelligent folks

with extremely impressive resources, who can be extremely helpful in terms of testing out theories and either bolstering them or knocking them down. If Newsweek wanted the greatest chance of arriving at the truth, it would have conducted its investigation openly, with the help of many others. That would be the bloggy way of doing it, and Im pretty sure that Goodman would have generated a lot of goodwill and credit for being transparent about her process and for being receptive to thehelpofothers. Whats more, a bloggy, iterative investigation would have automatically solved the biggest weakness with Goodmans article. Goodman likes to talk about forensic journalism, which isnota welldefinedphrase.Burrowfar enough into its meaning, however, and you basically end up with an investigation which follows lots of leads in order to eventually arrive at the truth. Somehow, the final result should be able to withstand aggressive crossexamination. At heart, then, forensic analysis is systematic, scientific: imagine an expert witness,armedwithherdetailedreport,

giving evidence in a court of law. Goodmans Newsweek article is essentially the conclusion of such a report: its not the report itself, and its not replicable, in thewaythat anythingscientificshould be.IfGoodmanthinksofherself as doing the work of a forensic scientist, then she should be happy to share her research or at least as much of it as isnt confidential with the rest of the world, and allowing the rest of the world to draw its own conclusions from the evidence which she has managed to put together. A digital, conversational, realtime investigation into the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, with dozens of people finding any number of primary sources and sharing them with everybody else thatwould have been a truly pathbreaking story for Newsweek, and could still have ended up with an awesome cover story. But of course it would lack the element of surprise Goodman wouldhave to have worked with other journalists, employed by rival publications, and that alone would presumably suffice to scupper any such idea. (Impoco was not the only magazine editor to turn down my big bitcoin story: Vanity

Fair also did so, when the New Yorker story came out,on some weird intraCond logic I never really bothered to understand. Competitiveness is in most magazine editors blood they all want to be first to any story, even if their readersdontcareintheslightest.) Instead, then, Newsweek published an article which even Goodman admits is not completely compelling on its own terms. If I read my own story, it would not convince me, she says. I would have a lot of questions. In other words, Goodman is convinced, but Goodmans article is not going to convince all that many people not within the congenitally skeptical journalistic and bitcoin communities,anyway. Goodman is well aware of the epistemic territory here. She says things like you have to be careful of confirmation bias, and happily drops references to Russells teapot and Fooled by Randomness. As such, she has sympathy with people like me who readherstory and arent convinced by it. Butiftheresonelessonabove allothersthatIvelearnedfromDannyKahneman,itsthat simply being aware of our biases doesnt really help us

overcome them. Unless and until Goodman can demonstrate in a systematic and analyticallyconvincing manner that her forensic techniques point to a high probability that Dorian is Satoshi, Im going to remain skeptical.

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