Quote from: cornfeedhobo on September 10, 2014, 11:38:16 AM

Also, has no one considered how utterly confusing this is; Someone demands to be paid *to* dox; instead of *not* to dox?
The whole thing is just... backwards.

Backwards is par for the course when it comes to a person of interest.

Just look at the tabloids/gossip magazine circuits. If you've got some juicy pictures of some actress at some public beach, do you A. tell the actress and ask her to send money to prevent you from releasing the pictures, or B. shop the pictures around to the tabloids/gossip magazines and ask them to send money if they want to have those pictures (typically as an exclusive)?
The former route almost always gets the photographer in question into legal trouble (blackmail), while the latter only gets them into trouble if the rag decides to play best buddies with the actress (in exchange for a nice spread in a future issue, after which they'll happily go back to posting juicy pics of her - dat symbiotic relationship doe), and set up a sting operation.

Either approach can work in this scenario. There's certainly plenty of common people who want to know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, and far fewer who think it's imperative that this is never revealed. Moreover, there's plenty of news outlets that want to do a piece on the real Satoshi Nakamoto and will go to great lengths just writing about trying to find out, or even publish an article that boils down to "We don't know if this is Satoshi, but our investigation had to end somewhere and it ended with this dude." That's not even counting any tinfoil hat angles about government actors/the mob/whatever having an interest in finding out.

So, no.. not all that confusing.

Unrelated, on security - I think this post deserves quoting (there's some further discussion over at Reddit, too):

Quote from: MrSike on September 09, 2014, 03:00:00 AM

On p2pfoundation the birth date is either 1974 ( Jan 1 - September 8 ) or 1975 ( September 9 - December 31 ). Watching when the age changed from 38-39 would have given the exact date. That is of course if he was consistent with the birth date.

Most people don't even think about that sort of thing coming to bite them in the butt sideways like that.
( Even if that may not be what happened here, it's good to keep in mind. )

As an aside - a birth date as a password reset question? Maybe that was okay before the age of MySpace, but certainly in this day and age there should not be any common password reset questions, let alone birth dates, regardless of any rate limiting. That's a major fail on the part of GMX.