The NYTimes infamously doxxed Slate Star Codex[1], despite him basically begging them not to because it would upend his psychiatry practice, back in 2020 for no reason other than because they could.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416

So you are suggesting the super rich get some extra layer of kid glove treatment, simply because they have more money?

This is a journalistic publication with a foundational value of transparency. If you study the history of institutions that favor transparency, they rarely ever need to further justify efforts of transparency beyond that underlying value. Transparency needs no further analysis of second order effects.

“What is gained…?” is simply not a question asked, for the same reason that advocates for privacy rarely if ever circumstantially ask the same question.

At least Adam Back is already publicly known to be worth at least tens of millions anywyas. Many of those dozens/hundreds of other guesses are not so lucky.

If the private key still exists, the BTC would be worth more like 10s of billions though. I choose to believe the key is long gone from this world though, whoever originally had it.

I think what makes this a little murkier is that this Beck guy appears to be already a well known figure in crypto circles. (I don't really follow the space). It feels more like uncovering the secret director of a film to be an established film producer.

For the last point, I agree there's a sort of "who cares" aspect to the piece. There is no artistic intent to interpret. The product speaks for itself making BTC the default crypto coin instead of any of the other millions of coins. The wealth from the founder, from what I can tell, has not been instrumentalized in any significant way.

You mean, why is it worth noting that someone who frequently speaks at conferences about Bitcoin, has businesses that utilise Bitcoin and is influential in the Bitcoin community is - the inventor of Bitcoin?

It's not even hundreds of millions. It's tens of billions of dollars if we suppose someone actually have access to these wallets.

Bitcoins across old unused wallets worth $30B to $80B depend of how you count it.

> What is gained by “unmasking” Satoshi other than satisfying one’s curiosity?

Those sweet, sweet clicks, and the eyeballs they bring along with them, of course

This one is challenging I think because the article itself is so thin. The evidence seems really shaky.

That said, clearly a lot of people really do seem to care who Satoshi is, so it doesn't seem like its out of the question for a newspaper to print an article claiming to answer that question.

> Do they just not care about the ethical implications?

Did Satoshi not care about the ethical implications of creating bitcoin? Mr Back may not be Satoshi, but he's also made a career driving the adoption of bitcoin and bitcoin itself has enabled many, many terrible crimes. It seems like special pleading to argue that Mr Back is not responsible for any of the consequence of bitcoin in the world, and also that the NY Times is morally responsible if someone harms Mr Back because they think he is Satoshi. Either we have an ethical responsibility to consider the consequences of our actions or we don't.

Never get between a journalist and their scoop.

And the "evidence" they presented includes things like, body language.

> I presented my evidence piece by piece. In his soft British lilt, Mr. Back insisted he wasn’t Satoshi and chalked it all up to a series of coincidences. But at times, his body language told a different story. His face reddened and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat when confronted with things that were harder to explain away.

Yes, they unironically wrote this.

Everyone knows that if you already believe someone is lying, you'll see all the signs that he's lying. It's confirmation bias 101, and this is unashamedly published on a so-called credible journalism outlet.

I think if something bad happens to Mr. Back (I hope not), the NYTimes is at least morally responsible.

invention of bitcoin is significant enough that world needs to know who really did it. Why is the person hiding is the real question.

> hundreds of millions

More in the range of 100 billion

I think of journalism like any other job where there's an expectation to produce results, where the main objective here is to write an article that lots of people read. It's a topic that catches a lot of people's attention, so in a sense they've succeeded by getting a lot of people to read and talk about it.

Hundreds of billions, not millions.

I think the wallets go well beyond "hundreds of millions". Aren't there like a million Bitcoin in dormant wallets associated with Satoshi? Personally, I'd assumed that whoever the person or persons were, they're dead because nobody can resist the pull of tens of billions of dollars regardless of their ideological position on cryptocurrencies. But that's just a guess.

There's absolutely a public interest in this. Sorry. This is a trillion dollar market now. Was this a state actor? If so, why? what was the plan here exactly? I see absolutely no reason to respect anonymity here. You don't get to sit on $50 billion and have people respect your desire to remain hidden.

> And really, for what?

Readership, clicks and views

>> And really, for what? What is gained by “unmasking” Satoshi other than satisfying one’s curiosity? There is no argument to be made there for the greater public good or anything like that.

Sure there is. A whole system of unregulated finance has been setup and it's very useful for criminality. How is not in the public interest to know who set it up and for what purpose? If it turned out Satoshi was actually a nation state and this was done for some nefarious purpose you think that's not in the public interest?

Are you implying there is an inherent right for public figures to hide their wealth, “for security reasons”? WTF?

Well given they have hunreds of millions of dollars to protect themselves with, it seems like it would be a good time to start using it.

I was thinking along the same lines. Isn't it just doxxing? Going deep into someone's online history and making hypothesis about who they are in real life, then publishing their name and what they do?

Exactly right. Unfortunately, this is likely a reporter who is just looking for something that will get attention. I remember a time when reporters wrote things based on importance, not chasing clickbait like everyone on social media. Whoever Satoshi is/was, they wanted privacy. Let them have it and move on.

By definition, if they’re not concerned about the ethics, they are not journalists and their occupation is not journalism. Nor does your employer’s reputation[1] allow them to claim such titles simple because they sign your pay cheque. You can’t inherit the title like that.

Journalist/journalism is like leader/leadership… too often used inappropriately, too often used to mislead, too often used inappropriately. Words such as reporter, hack, or NYT agent are more appropriate and more accurate.

Put another way, if your pet barks, would you still call it a cat? Of course not! If these people and entities aren’t fulfilling the baseline of the definition why do we continue to call them something they are not?

Journalist is a verb. It’s the decisions made and the actions taken. We’d be doing the collective a favor if we stopped giving credit where credit is NOT due.

[1] editorial: Most of us would agree that the NYT has lost its way. That it’s getting by on the fumes of integrity long gone.

I was just wondering the same thing.

Journalists largely have no morals or ethics these days. Literal scum of the earth, anything to make a name for themselves or to push their ideological agendas.

Why should journalism engage in the implied pro-active censorship here?

With that reasoning you could censor everything, including the Epstein files. You only need to find some "critical reason", usually being safety concern or "but but but the children". So I disagree with that rationale.

How far would you want censorship to go?

Having said that, I am not particularly interested in the "who is mystery man" debate situation.

> There is no argument to be made there for the greater public good

That's an opinion. While I personally don't care, others may, so your statement here is also just an opinion. Trump also said the Epstein files are not relevant - I and many others think differently. I wonder how deep the Epstein kompromat situation is, it would be an ideal blackmail situation. Any democracy can be factually undermined that way.

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He is a billionaire who should pay taxes.

I would assume that they don't care about the unmasking, because the whole thing is a just a misleading show, intended to misdirect you from the reality. I don't know the reality, but perhaps if the USG was behind the creation of BTC, that would explain it.

> There is no argument to be made there for the greater public good or anything like that.

Here is an argument for the greater public good.

Transparency. Bitcoin acts as an alternative global monetary system. It’s not centralized but whales can control the game. Acquisition of bitcoins are asymmetrical, meaning first adopters gained an enormous wealth and became whales virtually for free. So we can say it’s a rigged game. It becomes important to know who are all those people that can control a global monetary system. If Satoshi is an individual it may not matter. But what if it’s an organization, like CIA or o group of bankers. What if it was Epstein or Elon Musk, unlikely but viable candidates but the implications are huge.

Also we assume Bitcoin is for good and maker of a good thing can be anonymous. What if it is a harmful thing, like a Ponzi scheme to grab people’s money. Then Satoshi becomes a criminal rather than a hero, and public must know the name.

>Satoshi’s wallets are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and there have been kidnappings/torture/murders for much less than that.

So if Forbes publishes a list of the richest people in the world, it makes them targets?

NYT just doesn't care about the consequences of what they publish. A few years ago they put out a piece about how a big group of people were constantly raping another big group of people, that had significant geopolitical implications, it turned out to be entirely made up and they never apologised.

The NYTimes is basically a mouthpiece for US government interests. The US government has an interest in outing cryptocurrency actors of all kinds.