Satoshi: Why Newsweek isn’t convincing

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, 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.

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 she appeared on Bloomberg

TV, she said that she would love for people to look at the

“forensic research” and the public evidence in the case —

but, talking to me, she made it clear that she didn’t

consider it her job to help out other journalists by pointing

them to that evidence. What’s more, she also made it

clear that she was in possession of evidence which other

journalists couldnot obtain.

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 front cover of Newsweek, 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,

working for a serious and reputable publication.

Newsweek, it’s 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, said that he finds criticism of his story to

be “phenomenally offensive”, and then went on to make

the highly ill­advised remark that “we eliminated every

other possible person”. But that’s really a messaging

failure: he was on the back foot (SXSW is, after all, geek

HQ this week, and the geeks are gunning for Impoco right

now). Clearly, this was not the time or the place for a

considered discussion of evidentiary standards.

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

places where the debate is playing out; instead, they have

been giving interviews to mainstream media organizations,

which are often unhelpful. TV interviews devolve into

stupid fights; interviews with print or online journalists

result in just a couple of quotes.

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 likely candidates by the geek squad. Nick Szabo, for

instance, might well look like a good candidate if you’re

looking only at the original bitcoin paper, and asking who

is most likely to have written such a thing. But when she

looked at Szabo’s personal life, nothing lined up with

what she knew about Satoshi Nakamoto and his

communications. Instead, she found the Dorian Nakamoto

lead — and didn’t think much of it, at first. But the more

she kept trying to dismiss it, and failing to do so, the more

she wondered whether Dorian’s very invisibility —

“contextual silence”, she called it — might not be sending

her a message.

Towards the end of Goodman’s investigation, when she

was preparing to try to meet with Dorian Nakamoto in

person, Goodman told Impoco that if it didn’t turn out to

be Dorian, then “we’ve got nobody”. That’s 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 didn’t pan out as the guy, then

they didn’t have a story.

From my perspective, then, there’s a big disconnect

between what I now know about Goodman’s

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 Goodman’s 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

the beginning, out of the blue.

That storytelling technique would not persuade

everybody, of course: nothing would, or could. And, more

importantly, it isn’t 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

tell a fuller story.

But here’s 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; Goodman’s article was

probably already pushing the limits of what Impoco felt

comfortable with, given that he couldn’t 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 weren’t 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 of what ultimately became this article for Medium. 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 didn’t have broad

enough appeal to make it into a magazine.

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 she’s been talking to a lot of journalists,

especially on TV, while engaging relatively little on a

direct basis with her online critics. There’s no shortage of

substantive criticism of Goodman’s article online, and of

course there is no shortage of venues — including, but

not limited to, Newsweek.com — where Goodman could

respond to that criticism directly, were she so inclined. But

instead she has decided in large part not to join the online

debate, and instead is pondering whether or not to write a

self­contained follow­up article which might address some

of the criticism.

There’s a good chance that follow­up article will never

come, and that Goodman will simply cede this story to

others. And you can’t 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, and there are surely greatly

diminishing returns to saying a great deal more.

Still, it’s just as easy to sympathize with the frustration

being felt by the geeks. Appeals to authority don’t work

well on this crowd — and neither should they. If the US

government can lie about the evidence showing that there

were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it’s hard to

have much faith in an institution which, 18 months ago,

slapped “HEAVEN IS REAL” all over its cover. (That story,

interestingly enough, was demolished by another

mass­market magazine, Esquire.)

Indeed, both sides here have good reason to feel superior

to the other. From Newsweek’s 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 you might call

the internet’s 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

kind of fait accompli.

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 I’m pretty sure that Goodman would

have generated a lot of goodwill and credit for being

transparent about her process and for being receptive to

the help of others.

What’s more, a bloggy, iterative investigation would have

automatically solved the biggest weakness with

Goodman’s article. Goodman likes to talk about “forensic

journalism”, which is not a well­defined phrase. Burrow far

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, armed with her detailed report,

giving evidence in a court of law. Goodman’s Newsweek

article is essentially the conclusion of such a report: it’s

not the report itself, and it’s not replicable, in the way that

anything scientific should be. If Goodman thinks of herself

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 isn’t 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 would have

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 intra­Condé 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

readers don’t care in the slightest.)

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 Goodman’s 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

Russell’s teapot and Fooled by Randomness. As such,

she has sympathy with people like me who read her story

and aren’t convinced by it. But if there’s one lesson above

all others that I’ve learned from Danny Kahneman, it’s that

simply being aware of our biases doesn’t 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, I’m going to remain

skeptical.

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