The Bitcoin Crypto-Currency Mystery Reopened

<i>(...) it begs credulity that someone who has filed patent applications dealing with cryptography had never head of Bitcoin until I asked about it.</i><p>I don't see why; Bitcoin is hardly innovative in cryptographic research (in fact, that's part of its appeal, since it makes it more trustworthy), and I don't see why should a cryptography expert necessarily be interested in new currencies or financial tools.

So this guy finds a phrase that's kind of similar in the Bitcoin paper and in a patent application, then sees that the patent application is about some unrelated kind of cryptography, and then decides they must be Satoshi? This is nonsense.

Is it me, or does this all start to read like a Neal Stephenson novel?

So this is what we call investigative journalism these days?

I have long been an advocate for a single internet currency, independent of all governments. Looks like I'm not alone.<p>It's a hard sell though because so much of our lives are tied into the currency of the region that we live. How would you pay your rent online? How would your landlord settle their mortgage repayments?<p>We tend to believe that the fabric of our society is tied to the currency, and "real-world" money, even if in reality it no more exists than virtual money. In fact in the UK there have been a number of Towns who have printed their own money, and visitors come and buy that currency in preference to the National Currency for use in the town's shops bars and restaurants.

The main problem with bitcoin is that it seems to be more wishful thinking than a serious currency ruled by macro economic factors. There's not a clear correspondence about how the wealth is created and the demand for currency, not to mention that its deflational nature - i.e. its value is always expected to grow- leave serious questions about who'd you invest it, since its value is expected to increase in relation to the investment instrument, so why bother to invest?<p>I accept that the general idea is not bad, but it'd need to follow some basic standards in order to be attractive to regular people, you don't have to put your son college fund in a currency with no central authority and no convertibility, you can't expect any currency to always perform well so you need options, in case BitCoin start to lose it's value and there's no way to convert that money into Dollars or Euros you'll be stuck with a lots of worthless bits that won't let you buy not even Lehman Bros. junk bonds.

I think there are still plenty of easy avenues to search for the man's (or team's) identity. It would only be appropriate to crowdfund a pool of bitcoins for a bounty on discovering Satoshi Nakamoto's identity.

anyone here has some address to a page where we can keep track of bitcoin related news?

"For one, it begs credulity that someone who has filed patent applications dealing with cryptography had never heard of Bitcoin until I asked about it. That would be like a journalist claiming he never heard of Twitter."<p>this is a baseless assertion and essentially the crux of his argument. maybe real cryptographers don't spend any time thinking about bitcoin because it has the same relationship as twitter and real journalism.