The reporter that originally accused this dude of inventing bitcoin should get fired. 90+% of Newsweek readers will never see this tweet, and the original article is pretty speculative, so I don't know if it'll warrant a retraction. People hungry for bitcoin are probably going to come for Satoshi, and it won't be pretty.
In most countries in Europe, people have a "right of reply," which is the right to respond to printed allegations in the same publication that they were made (and with the same prominence, i.e. on the same page). Does anyone know of similar laws in the US?
The guy collecting the BTC donations has said that he will convert the BTC into actual money then deliver them using commonly accepted methods for payment in the United States. Delivering $X0,000 is not a particularly novel problem in the US economy. There exist many very straightforward ways of solving it.
Andreas M. Antonopoulos, apparently someone respected in the Bitcoin community, stated that he will convert any donations to that address into USD a the end of March and get it to Dorian.
> irony of throwing Bitcoins at a person whose life has been just severely discomforted by the very same subject.
that's sort of the whole point. The community are apologising on behalf of Newsweek. Not as a publicity stunt, not to convert the guy to bitcoin (he will receive a check in USD), just because it's the right thing to do.
You brute-force create private keys until you have one whose corresponding public key starts with your desired string. A commonly recommended command-line tool to do this is vanitygen. I feel the urge to say "I do not endorse that tool's security." (Though the same goes for Bitcoin generally.)
I called it when the story first broke with a simple question any reporter should've asked themselves:
> There's one thing that doesn't add up: why would such a privacy conscious man use his real name on a project he thought might be illegal? If he was so serious about his privacy, he would not have used his real name in public.
You're probably being ironic, but for the sake of the readers, I'll point out that most of us in the United States that are older than around 30 years old and learned to type using a formal system (including typing software) use double-spaces.
That's the way we were trained to type. The only thing this proves is that Satoshi was probably not a very young person. I don't think many people believe this anyway (or maybe he just "faked" the double-spaces?).
The joke was a reference back to Goodman's observartion in the original article: "the punctuation in the proposal is also consistent with how Dorian S. Nakamoto writes, with double spaces after periods and other format quirks."
Your comments about prevalence of this technique stand, of course.
"Presumably Newsweek didn't outright fabricate any of his quotes"
You're not familiar with journalists are you. If they can't get anything quotable out of you, even something they can mis-quote, they will just outright make it up.
Libel laws in this country practically means he has no legal recourse. He would need to prove that Newsweek made the whole thing up, not merely that they misunderstood him.
For better or for worse[1], we have a very strong protections on speech in the US. Although the specifics need to be addressed by his lawyer, in general Dorian needs to prove Newsweek did wrong, and that's a tough hurdle.
[1] I think "for better" but this is showing one of the sadder side effects.
I guess, if you can verify that there was communication by from the Satoshi Nakamoto account around the timeframe where he claims to be hospitalised (october 2012 and october 2013), it will be less likely that Dorian has bitcoin involvement.
> it will be less likely that Dorian has bitcoin involvement
So journalist write some made up story, and it's Dorian who has to prove it's fake? if you think things should work that way,then crappy journalists have won, and that exactly why they feel they can go on publishing crap,because of people thinking the way you do.
