Comment by onetwofiveten | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onetwofiveten | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know, my dad is retired, used to work as an engineer and loves model trains. He doesn't know what bitcoin is. It really isn't that unusual for technical people to get out of touch with recent developments. A 64 year old Japanese immigrant with health problems almost certainly has very different sources of information to you and I. Also, the vehement denials are extremely consistent with Dorian Nakamoto being a grumpy old man who doesn't understand what is going on but doesn't like it and wants to be left alone. It just seems like he just wanted to get rid of the reporter and she heard what she wanted to hear.

You'd expect there to be at least one Satoshi Nakamoto with an engineering background. Dorian Nakamoto's career doesn't seem remarkable or unusual (or closely related to bitcoin). I would expect every single person on Hacker News to fit the profile for the founder of bitcoin as well or better than Dorian Nakamoto. The fact that he has the same name as Satoshi Nakamoto doesn't indicate anything, because you would expect Satoshi Nakamoto to be a pseudonym.

Have you asked whether your father has even heard of bitcoin? I suspect a fair chance that he has. This is not adding the fact it would only take for someone in Dorian's family to merely google his name to learn of bitcoin.

The problem is Dorian is feigning total ignorance to the point of absurdity, followed by silly claims that somehow the accusation has damaged his family and his job prospects. He even went as far as claiming he has no internet service at all since last year, which is odd since clearly he must have emailed Leah Goodman only a month ago (another major plausibility problem in his denial).

It's one thing to be a grumpy old man, wanting nothing to do with the media, and quite another to blatantly lie and mislead people when trying to deny something. His behavior is closer to Lance Armstrong than just a grumpy old man. I think people need to weigh the credibility of both Dorian and the Newsweek article, and not merely dive head first into trying to disprove Newsweek at all cost.

You are grasping for the straws - leave it there. Many people when they get public attention especially unwanted attention react in abnormal ways which are compounded by cultural differences in case of immigrants. You are not on to something, Dorian is not Satoshi, case closed.

He has been living in US for more than 50 years; longer than I've been alive. He is also a Libertarian, a political position extremely rare in Japan. He appears to be totally Americanized with little trace of his former culture. His behavior is extremely similar to other people who turned out to have something to hide.

You have to admire the ingenuity and effort that went into not only blustering after the fact, but also creating the public portrait of "Dorian" the immigrant who'd never fully grasped the use of apostrophes, pluralization or indefinite articles whilst simultaneously privately corresponding in immaculate idiomatic English as "Satoshi". By the looks of those Amazon reviews and messages to editors there was some serious astroturfing going on!

Such a shame someone so keen on anonymity couldn't think of a pseudonym that wasn't composed entirely from part of his actual name.

You did read the official denial? The one we know is from Dorian. His English and punctuation is perfect. I fail to see how any argument that claims Dorian can't write English holds water. Maybe he wrote a terribly written comment somewhere but that doesn't mean he lacks fundamental English skills.

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