Dorian S. Nakamoto is probably having the weirdest day of his life. In less than 24 hours, the Temple City, California resident has been the subject of a Newsweek cover article “outing” him as the elusive creator of Bitcoin, has denied his involvement with the cryptocurrency, and has literally been chased around Los Angeles by a pack of rabid journalists.

Meanwhile, an individual claiming to be the real Satoshi Nakamoto said the Newsweek story was wrong in a brief post on the P2P Foundation‘s Ning page, stating simply “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.”

Though still no one knows for sure who Bitcoin’s creator is (or if Satoshi Nakamoto is even his real name), the Ning post is notable because it is connected with the same email address used on the 2009 P2P Foundation post and attached paper which was one of the first to describe Bitcoin.

TechCrunch emailed United Diversity founder and P2P Foundation Ning creator Josef Davies-Coates, who verified that the email associated with the account is the same one connected to the 2009 post. Here is our email exchange with Davies-Coates.

We’ve removed Nakamoto’s email address:

On 7 March 2014 02:48, Alexia Tsotsis wrote: Hi Josef, Thank you for responding so fast. It appears that the “real” Satoshi Nakamoto has commented on your P2PFoundation forum and denied the Dorian Nakamoto connection http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/profile/SatoshiNakamoto What’s the likelihood that it’s the same guy who posted the 2009 update commenting now? Could easily be the same person. But who is to say the original creator of the account is by the “real” person. I can confirm, however, that the registered email address on the account on our ning network is xxxxx@xxx.com which is the same one mentioned in the original paper. So perhaps whoever created that account is indeed the “real” person, whoever that is. I’d guess they likely are. What’s the likelihood that that 2009 guy is the real guy? No idea to be honest (but they do appear to have the same email address as used on the original paper). But now I understand why random people have suddenly started asking me if I know who Satoshi is! Is there any way to tell or prove it? Not that I’m aware of. But perhaps if some hard core geeks got access to both Ning and gmx log files they might be able to work something out. Unlikely though, I’d guess (the sort of people who can come up with stuff like bitcoin tend also to be the sort of people who know how to cover their digital tracks should they so choose, which it would appear they do). Thoughts on the Newsweek article in general? What article? :P (I just googled newsweek satoshi and see they’ve got an article about “the real face behind bitcoin” but for some peculiar reason it claims I’ve reached my 5 free articles per week, which can’t be true because I’ve not been there in the last week at all) Cheers, Josef.

Newsweek should really send Davies-Coates a non-paywalled version of the article. Or a pdf.