Celebrating Dorian Nakamoto, the Satoshi who wasn’t
It’s been 11 years since Newsweek ignited a media frenzy around Dorian Nakamoto
Dorian Nakamoto | Kevin McGovern/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks
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Bitcoin doesn’t have an official mascot.
Still, for at least a few years, Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto was the closest thing Bitcoin had to a spirit animal — an unassuming everyman who became symbolic of Bitcoin’s power to change the world from humble beginnings.
Newsweek started it on March 6, 2014 with “The Face Behind Bitcoin,” in which journalist Leah McGrath Goodman detailed a months-long investigation into potential candidates. But the article hinged on a misunderstanding.
Earlier attempts considered the Nakamoto name a pseudonym. Goodman instead searched for Satoshis hiding in plain sight.
Goodman found a number of people named Satoshi Nakamoto, dead and alive: “A Ralph Lauren menswear designer in New York and another who died in Honolulu in 2008, according to the Social Security Index’s Death Master File,” Goodman wrote.
Amazingly, tweets like these are still online.
Goodman eventually stumbled across a Satoshi in a database for naturalized US citizens. Dorian’s profile matched the background of someone who might’ve created Bitcoin: a brilliant, “obsessively private” physicist and engineer who boasted a keen interest in politics alongside a deep distrust of banks and government constructs.
Dorian, a Japan-born descendent of Samurai on his mother’s side and the son of a priest on his father’s side, hadn’t used his Satoshi birth name for 40 years, having legally changed it at the age of 23. He’d signed his name “Dorian S. Nakamoto” ever since.
When Goodman approached Dorian outside his home in southern California — after emails between the two had gone dark — he soon called the police. That Temple City home, by coincidence, was situated a few blocks away from Hal Finney’s.
A perfect storm
Dorian spent much of his career working on classified projects for major corporations and the US military, and per Newsweek’s report, Dorian believed he would get into trouble if he spoke with Goodman.
Before Goodman was shooed away, Dorian responded to a question about Bitcoin: “I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it. It’s been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection.”
Satoshi’s last known communication, an email to developer Mike Hearn, had occurred almost three years earlier.
Confusingly, all that tracks with what the real Satoshi might say — resulting in Newsweek running the piece as a cover story erroneously outing Dorian as Bitcoin’s inventor. Dorian later said that he thought Goodman was asking about his previous work with Citibank.
The story sparked a media frenzy. Silk Road had just been shut down by the FBI in the months prior, and bitcoin was retracing from a monster all-time high of $1,242 after rallying 10,000% in one year.
The media mobbed Dorian for days, leaving us with iconic photos of reporters chasing him around his neighbourhood and across LA.
Amid the chaos, Dorian lined up a sit-down conference with the Associated Press at their offices over a free sushi lunch with “lots of expensive varieties,” in which he explained the confusion and formally denied anything to do with Bitcoin.
In a written statement, Dorian expressed difficulty in finding steady work as an engineer or programmer, and that prospects for gainful employment had been harmed due to Newsweek’s article.
He’d even recently cut off his internet service “due to severe financial distress,” having been recovering from prostate surgery and a stroke at the time.
Friends we make
The Bitcoin community rallied fast around Dorian, who initially pledged to sue the outlet over the ordeal.
Within the same week, advocate Andreas Antonopoulos announced a BTC fundraiser on Reddit as a “sorry for what happened to you.” Antonopoulus, in an update, said he’d successfully made contact with Dorian and would deliver control of the funds in person.
More than 49 BTC flowed into the donation wallet — a vanity address that started with “1Dorian” — over the next two months, worth around $30,000 at the time. The chain shows almost a third of it was then directed to an in-between address before being forwarded to Coinbase starting in June 2014.
Another 17.5 BTC was sent to 1Dorian in December 2015 and the remaining bitcoin made its way to Coinbase in a similar manner in mid-2017.
A separate auction for artwork using Dorian’s likeness, a cryptograffiti piece made entirely of repurposed credit cards, later raised another 17.3 BTC ($5,500 at the time) for Dorian.
Combined with the Antonopoulos fundraiser, the BTC donations would be valued at about $7.5 million today, but it’s unclear how long Dorian has held.
Antonopoulos initially said the bitcoin would be sold for US dollars to be given to Dorian, while Dorian in a Reddit AMA in late 2015 said that he “didn’t sell” and that he planned to use the funds “as required.”
Dorian ironically became the de facto face for Satoshi over the next five years or so, spawning memes, t-shirts and other art.
Perhaps, it had something to do with Dorian’s embracing of the Bitcoin community after the media had caused so much trouble, even attending conferences here and there.
Or, maybe it was his insightful comments about the state of modern society and the economy he’d made on Reddit — as well as thoughtful reflections on the state of Bitcoin development — some which were so poignant that they might have well come from the creator of Bitcoin himself.
It’s often said that we’re all Satoshi. Dorian showed us how true that statement really is, only that clearly, some are more Satoshi than others.
The People’s Satoshi
They say a picture is worth 1,000 words. In the case of Satoshi Nakamoto, it might be more.
Ever since the enigmatic founder of Bitcoin left in 2011 both fans and onlookers haven’t had so much a clue as to his appearance. Artists were left to fill in the gaps.
A simple Google search reveals that images of Satoshi have hardly been consistent. In fact, they’ve evolved substantially over the years, with Satoshi’s story.
As far back as 2013, there wasn’t really much of a mystery about Satoshi. He had only been gone a few years, and was commonly pictured as a younger Asian man. As Wikileaks’ Julian Assange and Edward Snowden began associating with the movement, the iconic Guy Fawkes mask proved a fitting substitute, one that spoke to the technology’s (alleged) advantages.
From 2014 on, it was Dorian’s visage that took the top spot, the flustered middle-aged computer scientist who shooed reporters while covering his face. It, too, came and went.
In the years to come, there was arguably an effort to make Satoshi more of an everyman. In Budapest, Hungary and Lugano, Switzerland, there are statues depicting a hooded figure in homage to Satoshi. Some aren’t fans, believing it lends itself to the “shadowy coder” trope.
Yet, today, it’s perhaps Dorian’s picture that is most enduring — the revival due in no small part to Bitcoin’s sprawling meme-o-sphere, where Dorian’s lasting scowl has been embraced, recast as a kind of talisman for the disdain Bitcoin users still feel for the media and non-believers.
So, despite calls for Dorian to retain his privacy (after all, as David notes, he may own a now not insignificant sum of bitcoin) he can be seen on the internet daily, refusing to raise prices, or as a public facing brand for popular social media accounts.
In this way, Dorian might be the most fitting Satoshi, in that his version is one that has been reclaimed, an image that, once wielded as a weapon, has been recast by advocates into a lasting reminder of their outsider status. We wouldn’t want it any other way.
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