"I am not Dorian S. Nakamoto."

    That was the simple message posted from an account on the website of the Peer to Peer Foundation at 10 p.m. ET Thursday. The message was posted from an account under the name "Satoshi Nakamoto."

    The pseudonymous creator of the Bitcoin digital currency protocol had previously discussed the development of his invention on this forum, using this account, until he vanished from the world he created. The last prior activity on the account was from Feb. 18, 2009 -- also a discussion about bitcoin. The founder of the Peer to Peer Foundation has stated that the e-mail registered with the account matches previous public emails associated with Satoshi Nakamoto in Bitcoin's original design documents.

    This doesn't necessarily mean much. The account might have been hacked. Or Dorian S. Nakamoto may simply have logged in to spread disinformation in an attempt to deflect the media maelstrom converging around him. But combined with an AP interview in which a sometimes confused Dorian denied his involvement with Bitcoin and serious inconsistencies in the language abilities of the two Nakamotos, Leah McGrath Goodman's story at least starts to look contestable.

    And it doesn't matter a bit.

    Whether or not he is in fact Dorian S. Nakamoto, and whatever his motivations, the absence of Satoshi Nakamoto from the huge hype surrounding the virtual money he created has obviously left onlookers not just curious, but slightly manic. A constant stream of speculation and investigation stretching all the way back to 2011 has tried to plug the hole at the center of bitcoin, including attempts by Joshua Davis at the New Yorker, a textual analyst named Skye Grey, and a slew of other amateur and professional investigators. None of the theories have proven out, and Newsweek's scoop may be the next to fall.

    But somehow, without its creator, bitcoin soldiers on.

    There are many important, sensible reasons we want to know who created bitcoin. Money is based on trust, after all, and an anonymous creator inspires little. Even among bitcoin early adopters, there has been persistent hypothesizing that the bitcoin code could contain secret functions controlled by the anonymous creator -- for example, a killswitch that would disable the entire network.

    Except that we know this isn't true, because the bitcoin code is entirely public, and has at this point been reviewed and revised by thousands of programmers across the world. This includes the founders and employees of profitable businesses, who have every motivation to ensure they're on stable ground.

    The trust increasing numbers of people place in bitcoin rests on that community, and on that ecosystem. Though shakeouts continue among bitcoin entrepreneurs, its decentralized, open-source development model has made the underlying protocol as trustworthy as any technology controlled by a strong creator -- or more.

    But still, people go looking for one person whose identity can stand in for the trustworthiness of an entire system.

    “我不是多利安•S•中本。”

    这是美国东部时间上周四晚10点，一个账号在Peer to Peer Foundation网站上留下的简单信息。这个账号的用户名是“中本聪”。

    这位比特币数字货币协议的匿名缔造者曾在这个论坛上使用过这个账号，探讨他发明的这种货币的未来发展，直到他消失在这个他自己亲手创造的世界。这个账号最后的活跃日期是2009年2月18日——那是一次关于比特币的讨论。Peer to Peer Foundation的创始人表示，这个账号的注册邮箱与中本聪之前的比特币原始设计文档相关联的公共邮箱一致。

    其实，这些未必有多大的意义。这个账号也存在被黑客盗取的可能。或者多利安•S•中本只是为了登录论坛散播虚假信息，希望转移已经把他淹没的媒体关注漩涡。不过在美联社（AP）的采访中，多利安否认自己与比特币的关系，还表现得非常困惑。此外，作为被采访人的中本与网络上的中本，两者的语言能力也大相径庭。结合这两点看，利亚•麦格拉斯•古德曼的故事至少看起来是具有争议的。【自由撰稿人古德曼曾在《新闻周刊》发表文章称，她已经找到了比特币的发明人中本聪，还与他进行了面谈。然而此人在接受美联社采访时否认自己跟这种数字货币存在任何关系。——译注】

    但这根本就无所谓。

    无论他是否是真的多利安•S•中本，也无论他的动机是什么，在他自己创造的虚拟货币的大肆炒作中，中本聪置身事外，这一点让围观者不仅好奇，而且变得有些疯狂。追溯到2011年的一连串推测和调查，都在试图填补比特币中心的这一空白。《纽约客》（New Yorker）的约书亚•戴维斯、文本分析师斯凯•格雷和其他许多爱好者和专业调查者都进行过尝试，但他们提出的理论都没能让人们满意，《新闻周刊》（Newsweek）的独家新闻可能又将是一次失败的调查。

    然而不知为何，尽管没有了创造者，比特币却依然坚挺至今。

    我们之所以想搞清是谁创造了比特币是出于许多重要、合理的理由。毕竟，金钱建立在信任的基础上，匿名的创造者无法取信于人。即便是比特币的早期用户，也在不断怀疑比特币的代码中可能包含由创造者控制的秘密功能——比如能让整个网络瘫痪的“杀戮开关”。

    但我们知道事实并非如此，因为比特币的代码完全公开，而且此时已经经过全世界成千上万程序员的检查和修订。这些人中也包括盈利性公司的创始人和员工，他们有着充分的动机来确保自己的安全。

    越来越多的人开始信任比特币，但这种新任有赖于比特币社区及其生态系统。尽管比特币的企业家中不断有人破产，但比特币分散化和开源的发展模式使得比特币底层协议的可靠性足以媲美其他优秀开发者控制的任何技术——甚至更加可靠。

    尽管如此，人们依然在寻找这样一个人，光这个人的身份就能表明整个系统的可靠性。

    Take the most obvious contrast -- Steve Jobs, the most revered tech icon of our era, and Apple (AAPL), the massive company he created. Jobs was obviously supremely gifted and dedicated -- but also well-known as controlling. Jobs pushed his Type A personality to the boundary and was considered a "huge jerk" by some, firing employees in public and tearing into suppliers with expletive-laden tirades.

    His ethos lives on in the company he founded (though with less swearing). Apple has created a closed computing ecosystem, allowing it to control user experience from hardware to software -- including denying App store access to iOS programs that don't meet its standards, or just don't project the right image.

    But this is about more than whether you can get a sexting app for your iPhone. We don't know what is in the code of Apple's operating systems, because no one but Apple can check it -- and no one but Apple can fix it. This has led not just to security failures, which in today's computing systems are nearly inevitable, but to sometimes long delays in fixing those problems. Despite all this, many users continue to trust Apple, in part because of the image of a steady hand projected for many years by Steve Jobs.

    In this way, Apple and Bitcoin are mirror images of each other -- we know almost nothing about Bitcoin's founder, but everything about its substance. We know a lot about Apple's founder, but very little about its code.

    People, for the most part quite distinct groups of people, place their trust in both institutions, for different, even opposite reasons. Some of us simply want technology that works, and we're willing to defer to the people and organizations in charge, even if they don't let us check under the hood. Others want to be able to see things for themselves -- or, even if they're not technically skilled, just like knowing that some disinterested third party could be keeping an eye on things.

    The bitcoin community has responded to Newsweek's identifying Dorian S. Nakamoto not with fascination or excitement, but with criticism directed at Goodman, and demands that the public respect Nakamoto's anonymity. The people actively developing Bitcoin aren't spending their time searching for their version of Steve Jobs, or even supporting those who are.

    This preference for operating without leaders or even figureheads is reminiscent of nothing so much as the faded Occupy Wall Street protests. Occupy's anarchist ideology is kissing-cousins with the anti-government, anti-bank libertarianism that drove many early bitcoiners. Both are manifestations of growing societal resistance to authority of any kind -- an impulse that also, it must be said, manifests in climate change denialism and foreign and domestic terrorism. On the other hand, the Jobs-Apple model analogizes with authoritarian statism. At extremes, both libertarian and authoritarian impulses are destructive.

    In a world where technology defines greater and greater swathes of public life, code and hardware are more than an analog for politics. Our interfaces and devices define a large portion of our interactions with the world. The search for Satoshi Nakamoto, and the clash of cultures it is triggering, gives us an opportunity to think about the kind of leaders we want to design our lives -- and whether we need them at all.

    举个最明显的反例——史蒂夫•乔布斯，我们这个时代最受尊崇的技术偶像，以及他创造的伟大公司苹果（Apple）。显然，乔布斯才华横溢，专注投入——但他的控制欲也同样出名。乔布斯把他的A型人格发扬到了极致，他曾在公共场合开除员工，甚至满嘴脏话长篇大论地咒骂供应商，因而被一些人称作“大混蛋”。

    他的精神依旧存在于他创立的这家公司中（尽管少了些咒骂）。苹果打造了封闭的计算机生态体系，使它能够控制从硬件到软件在内的所有用户体验——包括禁止那些达不到标准、抑或只是设计形象不合适的iOS应用在其App商店上架。

    但这不仅是能否给iPhone下载色情应用的问题。我们不知道苹果操作系统的代码里有什么，因为除了苹果，没人可以查看它——除了苹果，也没人可以修复它。这一点不仅导致了安全漏洞（在当今的操作系统中，漏洞几乎是不可避免的），有时候还会延误修复时间。尽管存在这些问题，许多用户依然信任苹果，某种程度上也是因为史蒂夫•乔布斯多年来塑造的稳定形象。

    如此看来，苹果和比特币是截然相反的两种形象——我们对比特币的创始人几乎一无所知，却对比特币如数家珍；我们对苹果的创始人了如指掌，却对苹果的代码却知之甚少。

    尽管人们大都来自完全不同的群体，却因为不同的、甚至相反的理由，对这两种体系都给予了信任。一些人仅仅是想要好用的技术，因此愿意听命于负责的人和公司，就算他们不让我们查看他们葫芦里到底卖的什么药。另一些人想要亲自看清一切——或者说，就算是外行，他们也希望得知可能有公正无私的第三方在监管着这些事情。

    比特币社区就《新闻周刊》确认多利安•S•中本的身份一事做出了回应。他们并未表示出兴趣或兴奋之情，而是把批评的矛头指向了古德曼，要求公众尊重中本的匿名权。这些在比特币开发领域表现活跃的人们并没有浪费时间去寻找他们自己的史蒂夫•乔布斯，甚至也没有去支持那些乔布斯级别的人物。

    宁愿在没有领袖甚至象征领袖的带领下进行运作的情况，令人回想起已经降温的“占领华尔街”（Occupy Wall Street）运动。“占领”运动的无政府主义理念与驱使许多早期比特币工作者的反政府、反银行的自由主义大同小异。两者都体现了社会中对任何形式的权威日益增强的反抗——不得不说，这种冲动也体现在气候变化否定论和国内外恐怖主义中。另一方面，乔布斯-苹果模式类似于独裁主义的中央集权。而自由主义和独裁主义的冲动只要走了极端，都具有很大的破坏力。

    在这个技术与公众生活越来越息息相关的世界，编码和硬件不仅仅是政治活动的模拟。我们的界面和设备很大程度上决定了我们与世界交流的形式。寻找中本聪，以及这一风波引发的文化冲突，让我们有机会得以思考：我们需要怎样的领袖来设计我们的生活，以及，我们是否真的需要这样的领袖。（财富中文网）

    译者：严匡正