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More Details On Newsweek Journalist's Interview With Alleged Bitcoin Creator

This article is more than 10 years old.

Updated 6:28 p.m. with comments from the Temple City Sheriff's Station

In a long article that points to a 64-year-old California man Dorian Nakamoto as Bitcoin's creator, the most compelling evidence that he is truly the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto are remarks made on his doorstep while he attempted to wave Newsweek journalist Leah McGrath Goodman away. "I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it," Goodman reports he said. "It's been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection."

This would be in keeping with the history of Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto's distancing himself from the project starting in 2011. However, many doubts have been raised about the Newsweek piece with Dorian Nakamoto saying he hadn't heard of Bitcoin until three weeks ago and a long dormant online account for Satoshi Nakamoto coming back to life for the first time in years to say, "I am not Dorian Nakamoto." In a phone conversation Friday, Goodman says she doesn't have a tape recording of her encounter with Nakamoto, but did provide new details about what transpired.

"I had a notebook, but it was obvious that a tape recording was not welcome," says Goodman. Goodman had visited the home two hours earlier and knocked on the door. Dorian Nakamoto peeked out but refused to open the door, so Goodman wrote a letter saying she wanted to talk to him about Bitcoin and left it in the grill of his door along with her business card and a German bitcard -- a plastic card that had Bitcoin value stored on it.

When she returned after getting lunch, Nakamoto was standing in his driveway with two sheriff's deputies. Some people have questioned the veracity of her described encounter with them, expressing surprise that one of the police officers responded with this after she explained that she wanted to ask the man about Bitcoin because he was Satoshi Nakamoto: "This is the guy who created Bitcoin? It looks like he's living a pretty humble life."

"One of the police officers was aware of Bitcoin, not both," said Goodman. "The one who I quoted was a guy who knew a little bit."

Captain Michael Parker, the spokesperson for Temple Sheriff's Station, says Goodman provided context about Bitcoin before the deputy made his comment (and that a fellow deputy in the department has authored two articles on Bitcoin, meaning there is some familiarity with the digital currency there). The spokesperson says the deputies were called to Nakamoto's home because "the caller reported an unknown woman in her 20s knocking on the door of the home and sitting on his porch for the last hour."

Goodman says the encounter with Nakamoto and the two deputies only lasted a few minutes. "Both sheriff's deputies agreed that the quotes published in the March 6, 2014, Newsweek magazine Bitcoin article that were attributed to the resident and to one of the deputies were accurate," says Parker. (Full statement below.)

"I was prepared up until the day I spoke to him for him to laugh and say it was a ridiculous coincidence. But he didn’t; he acknowledged it," says Goodman. "I told him, 'You’re acknowledging Bitcoin and if you weren’t involved you need to tell me now.' He said, 'I cannot do that.'"

Since the article has come out, Dorian Nakamoto has said that he thought she was asking him about his classified engineering work or his time at Quotron, a company he worked at, not his time working on Bitcoin. Goodman says that she had reached out to him previously about Bitcoin, and left a letter and the bitcard, which he had two hours to review.

Two stories, two interpretations; this is feeling more and more like the Kurosawa film Rashomon where the truth in the story depends on your perspective.

Goodman concedes that Dorian Nakamoto's writing style is different from Satoshi Nakamoto's, as has been pointed out on Reddit and elsewhere. When she corresponded with him by email, it was "sloppy" and "slapdash," she says.

"His personal correspondence was highly abbreviated," she says. “When he writes formally, it was much more polished.”

Goodman says Newsweek has other samples of his writing, and that the discrepancy was addressed in the story by including his son, Eric Nakamoto, being "torn over whether his father is the founder of Bitcoin, noting that messages from the latter appear more 'concise' and 'refined than that of my father's.'"

Business Insider interviewed one of the forensic analysts who worked on the story; in the interview, Sharon Sergeant focused on the use of "disk space" and "Moore's Law" in the original Bitcoin paper as proving the founder was an older developer. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who has invested in Bitcoin companies, is skeptical of that reasoning, tweeting, "In our office at A16Z, there are probably 20 conversations a day about disk space and/or Moore's Law. And they're not getting less frequent."

Meanwhile, sympathetic members of the Bitcoin community have started a Bitcoin donation fund for Dorian Nakamoto; it has received nearly 20 Bitcoin, or $12,000, as of this writing. Goodman may have been the first to donate to Nakamoto. "He kept the bitcard," she says. "He didn’t give it back to me."

Here is Goodman talking about the piece on CNN Money.

---- FULL STATEMENT from Temple Sheriff’s Station of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department ----

Suspicious Person Call in Temple City on Feb. 20, 2014

At 2:09PM, on Thursday, Feb. 20, 2014, Temple Sheriff’s Station of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department received a suspicious person call in Temple City. The caller reported an unknown woman in her 20’s was knocking on the door at his home, and sitting on his porch for the past hour. The caller said he was afraid to open the door.

Two deputies responded and spoke to the male resident caller and the woman. The woman identified herself as Newsweek reporter Leah Goodman and the resident expressed reluctance to talk to her. The deputies were present for the brief conversation between the two, and then the resident went back inside his home and the reporter left.

“I spoke to the two Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies who handled the call and who were present for the conversation,” said Captain Mike Parker, Sheriff’s Headquarters Bureau, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. “Both sheriff’s deputies agreed that the quotes published in the March 6, 2014, Newsweek magazine Bitcoin article that were attributed to the resident and to one of the deputies were accurate.”

---

* With reporting contributed by Trevor Timm