LOS ANGELES—A 64-year-old physicist, identified by Newsweek magazine as Bitcoin’s creator, denied involvement in the digital currency before leading reporters on a multi-vehicle car chase and entering an Associated Press bureau.

The pursuit through Los Angeles came as the Bitcoin world debated whether Dorian S. Nakamoto is the mysterious computer coder who wrote the seminal paper on the digital currency and created the software that serves as its backbone.

Hours after Newsweek named the former defence industry and U.S. government employee, Nakamoto emerged from his house in a suburban Temple City neighborhood where reporters had gathered.

“I’m not involved in Bitcoin,” he said.

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The initial Bitcoin paper carried the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. Since the author or authors otherwise chose to remain private and anonymous, it had been widely assumed the name was a pseudonym. The Nakamoto living in Temple City used to be named Satoshi, Newsweek said.

He told reporters he would go to lunch with one of them and that it would be expensive. He picked an AP reporter, and they got a blue Toyota Prius and headed for Mako Sushi in nearby Arcadia. Nakamoto tried to keep his face shielded. Other reporters followed to the restaurant, where Nakamoto, seeing he wasn’t going to be left alone, bolted.

The pair got back into the car and headed toward downtown Los Angeles, 18 miles away, where they disappeared into the office of the local AP bureau, according to Twitter postings by Joe Bel Bruno, a Los Angeles Times editor. By mid-afternoon, a gaggle of non-AP reporters were standing outside the office waiting for him to come out.

The episode followed a day in which Bitcoin enthusiasts reacted to Newsweek’s article with a mixture of resignation and disbelief, with some debating his role or whether he should have been left alone.

“Fascinating,” Martti Malmi, a Finnish programmer who worked with Nakamoto on the Bitcoin code, wrote on Twitter. “Satoshi seems not much different than how I imagined him.”

Peter Lam, 53, a real-estate agent who has lived down the street since 2001, said he’d talked to Dorian Nakamoto and his parents a few times. He said Dorian wasn’t especially sociable.

Gavin Andresen, the chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation who had been one of the few people to communicate with Satoshi Nakamoto, didn’t immediately indicate whether he could identify Dorian Nakamoto as Bitcoin’s creator. Andresen said in a message on Twitter that he regrets talking to the magazine about Nakamoto. He said he was disappointed that Newsweek decided to “dox,” or document, the Nakamoto family.

Until now, Satoshi Nakamoto was thought to be a pseudonym for a programmer or group of programmers who wrote the paper and the initial source code for Bitcoin. The code has since been handed off to a loose group of experts affiliated with the foundation, a Seattle-based advocacy group.

The paper, first published in 2008, offered a proof of the basic concept of Bitcoin, which uses a public ledger and a network of voluntary computers, known as “miners,” to validate transactions that are signed with encrypted signatures. After the initial source code created the first batches of Bitcoin, it grew from an obsession of specialists into a global phenomenon.

Merchants around the world now accept Bitcoin for everything from kitchen appliances on Overstock.com to luxury goods listed on BitPremier, a website. It also trades for traditional currencies, and was priced at $654.34 at 6:03 p.m. New York time today, according to the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index.

According to Newsweek reporter Leah McGrath Goodman, when Dorian Nakamoto was confronted at his home before publication and asked about Bitcoin, he responded, “I am no longer involved in that and cannot discuss it. It’s been turned over to other people.”

Some Bitcoin enthusiasts said they were skeptical that Newsweek had found the right person. Others said they were furious that the news media would try to violate his privacy.

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“I would have thought every Satoshi Nakamoto on planet Earth had already been contacted and ruled out,” Stephen Pair, the chief technical officer at Atlanta-based BitPay, a payment processor. “If this person is the real Satoshi, it would be easy to for him to prove it if he wanted to.”

Jeff Garzik, one of the core developers on the Bitcoin software protocol and an employee of BitPay, said “the ‘real’ Satoshi” can prove his identity only through cryptography.

“We will know Satoshi by his digital signatures,” Garzik said in an email, adding that the founder could either sign a message using his unique encryption key or make use of the Bitcoins that the creator is known to have kept.

Analysts who looked at the Bitcoin ledger have concluded that the creator of the system owns about 1 million coins, worth over $600 million at current prices, said Jered Kenna, a San Francisco Bitcoin investor. If the owner pledged never to sell or trade them, it would help add stability to what has been a volatile market, Kenna said.

Adam Draper, the chief executive officer of Boost, a San Mateo, California, company that incubates Bitcoin startups, called the Newsweek article “intrusive” and said he’s unconvinced.

“If Satoshi Nakamoto wanted to be anonymous the whole time, why would he use his real name on the paper?” Draper said. “He always used non-tracking emails and did everything he could to stay anonymous, so it’s difficult for me to understand why he would use his real name.”

Newsweek said Dorian Nakamoto, who was born in Japan, attended California State Polytechnic University, worked for defence contractors on classified military projects and eventually the Federal Aviation Administration. He adopted the first name Dorian in 1973, according to court documents cited by Newsweek.

Tim Lynch, a spokesman for California Polytechnic, confirmed that a Satoshi Nakamoto earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from its Pomona campus in 1973. He declined to provide any more information, citing privacy rules.

The revelations will not affect the Bitcoin network, said Gregory Maxwell, one of the core developers on the project. The code is now out of Nakamoto’s hands, and can’t be changed except by broad consensus among the users of the network.

“There has been extensive rewriting and reorganization since the time when the creator of the system ended his involvement,” Maxwell said in an e-mail.

Jerry Brito, director of technology policy at the Mercatus Center of George Mason University, said that if Satoshi Nakamoto has been found it could be a good thing for the digital currency.

“Maybe we can all just put to rest now the ‘mysterious origins’ story and focus on Bitcoin’s future,” Brito said.

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