On March 6, the 81-year-old magazine Newsweek returned to print with a splashy cover story. Writer Leah McGrath Goodman said she had discovered the elusive creator of Bitcoin, hiding in plain sight. "Not even his family knew," she wrote, after breathlessly describing how she confronted Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto at his home in a Los Angeles suburb.

The scoop couldn't have come at a better time. Bitcoins have exploded in value over the last year, making early investors rich, and the crypto-currency is finally emerging from wonky tech circles to gain traction with a mainstream audience. The idea that Bitcoin founder “Satoshi Nakamoto”—long thought to be a pseudonym—was living in a modest house in a Los Angeles suburb, and under his real name, was irresistible.

The problem with the story is that it doesn't appear to be true. Dorian Nakamoto—who hasn’t gone by the name “Satoshi” in almost 40 years—made the second of two very public denials this week. “I got nothing to do with it,” Nakamoto said during his first denial, a two-hour interview with the Associated Press.

Goodman’s story looks like a scientific experiment gone bad: it can’t be replicated. It’s grounded in assumptions, topped with myths and stereotypes, and then backed up by an arrogant-sounding “trust us” defense.

The AP video shows a man who appears wholly convincing. “The main reason I’m here is to clear my name, that I have nothing to do with Bitcoin,” Nakamoto said. “Leah wrote all that?” he added with a shake of his head, incredulous. If Dorian Nakamoto is the hidden genius behind Bitcoin, he's also one of history’s most skilled liars; his impression of “unemployed suburban man” was spot-on.

Faced with that initial denial and a mounting army of critics who saw serious logical flaws in Newsweek’s methodology, the magazine decided to double down on its hunch that Dorian was the right guy. Not only did Newsweek stand by the story, but Goodman has insisted in multiple interviews that she’s got her man. In her most extensive interview, with Reuters’ Felix Salmon, Goodman said that she had additional evidence beyond what appeared in print—but that she wouldn’t reveal it. (Goodman didn’t respond to requests for an interview for this article.)

Salmon remained unconvinced and saw in the piece a values clash between the tech world and old-school journalism. That analysis is insightful but frankly too generous to Goodman and her editors, who have continued to assert that their two-month act of “forensic journalism” correctly led them to a man who is, by every other account, just an everyday guy.

Following Nakamoto’s second denial this week, this time issued through a lawyer, the Newsweek story looks anything but forensic. Goodman’s story looks like a scientific experiment gone bad: it can’t be replicated. It’s grounded in assumptions, topped with myths and stereotypes, and then backed up by an arrogant-sounding “trust us” defense that is 25 years out of fashion.

The “driveway moment”

Goodman’s story began with the end of her search. Dorian Nakamoto—whom she called Satoshi from the first sentence of her story—stood in his driveway, slack-jawed and stunned by her appearance at his home. Goodman's thesis that he was Bitcoin's inventor rests on the words they exchanged in the next few minutes.

In an appearance on Bloomberg TV, Goodman again cited Nakamoto’s silence and one disputed “denial” as proof that she had her man.

Nakamoto had actually been alarmed enough by Goodman hanging out on his porch to call the cops. Sheriff's deputies showed up to escort her off his property (and they later verified the essence of her quotes).

"I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it," Nakamoto told Goodman when she asked him about Bitcoin, as two Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies stood in the driveway. “It's been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now."

Nakamoto later explained that he was refusing to talk about his engineering work. As a worker for government contractors, Nakamoto was repeatedly told to not discuss his work with others. That, and some natural taciturnity, would explain not only the "driveway moment" but his repeated refusals to open up to Goodman. Part of Nakamoto's decision to say something to Goodman may have been nothing more than a desire to explain his call to the deputies.

In Monday's denial, Nakamoto elaborated on the incident. “The reporter confronted me at my house,” he said in a statement. “I called the police. I never consented to speak with the reporter. In an ensuing discussion with a reporter from the Associated Press, I called the technology ‘Bitcom.’ I was still unfamiliar with the term.”

For Goodman, the driveway denial and the earlier silences further confirmed her thesis. She saw herself as the winner of a long journalistic contest to reveal Nakamoto. “He stands not with defiance, but with the slackness of a person who has waged battle for a long time and now faces a grave loss,” she wrote.

When other journalists asked Goodman how she could prove her case, she kept circling back to the “confession” at Nakamoto's house in Temple City.

“I was prepared up until the day I spoke to him for him to laugh and say it was a ridiculous coincidence,” Goodman told Forbes. “But he didn’t; he acknowledged it.”

“Why are you so sure?” CBS’ Charlie Rose asked Goodman the same day of Nakamoto’s denial. “The conversation I had with him, that’s the clincher for me,” she answered.

In an appearance on Bloomberg TV, Goodman again cited Nakamoto’s silence and one disputed “denial” as proof that she had her man.

“You amassed this evidence,” said Bloomberg’s Trish Regan. “Did you present it to him? Did he have a chance to deny it or confirm it?”

“I spoke to him when I saw him, and I reached out to him several times by e-mail and by phone,” said Goodman. “Unfortunately, he fell silent as soon as I broached the topic of Bitcoin... His whole background… would inform the sort of coding that was required for Bitcoin."

“I would guess there are 10,000 people that are described by what you just said,” said co-host Tom Keene.

“If 10,000 people fit all the attributes we looked at, I would like to talk to those people,” said Goodman. “Our forensic research led to him, and we cannot find any reason to not continue asking if this man is the man… He confirmed it.”

Forensic journalism meets “pocket protector stereotypes”

Goodman's short encounter had to be the "clincher" because the other evidence in the story seems entirely circumstantial. Newsweek’s “forensic research” boiled down to background research on a preset list of candidates, which included everyone they could find named Satoshi Nakamoto. (Of course, there was no good way to produce a sufficient set of candidates not named Satoshi Nakamoto.)

When one of Newsweek’s forensic analysts piped up and spoke to Business Insider, it became clear that the process of eliminating the “candidates” included a whole lot of canned thinking and stereotypes.

“It still comes down to the fact that we could not rule him out,” said the forensic analyst. “I said, ‘I think I know this guy—he wears a pocket protector, has a slide rule, he comes from that genre,’” she said. Mentions of “disk space” and “Moore’s law” suggested an older computer scientist, she said, but those concepts resonate in Silicon Valley today, as Marc Andreessen noted.

Dorian was the last candidate, the guy they couldn’t rule out, and the guy who wouldn’t talk to them.

The Newsweek story posited various similarities between Dorian Nakamoto and "Satoshi Nakamoto," some more convincing than others. For instance, Goodman wrote that Dorian Nakamoto’s writing style is similar to the key paper describing Bitcoin. Once writing samples were analyzed by people without months invested in an investigation, however, it became pretty clear that the writing styles aren’t , in fact, similar at all. Goodman had seized on small things like “double spaces after periods and other format quirks,” which she believed supported the Dorian-Satoshi connection.

Other “similarities” between Dorian Nakamoto and the creator(s) of Bitcoin are thin, to put it generously. Dorian Nakamoto is good at math; he has libertarian-leaning views; and he hasn’t been employed since 2001, which is when some people believe work on Bitcoin began.

While Goodman repeatedly cited Dorian's “career path” as evidence in interviews, that element points directly away from a Dorian-Satoshi connection. Dorian Nakamoto knows about computers, but he studied physics—in the 1960s. While a portrait of the lone inventor working in quiet isolation may sound romantic, the Bitcoin inventor(s) knew cryptography well—and there’s no evidence whatsoever that Nakamoto is conversant with the relevant crypto or distributed algorithms. Monday, he explicitly denied such knowledge.

“One of the weakest points in Newsweek’s argument is their assertion that Dorian had the skills and background to create Bitcoin,” noted Ed Felten, a computer science professor and the FTC’s former chief technologist, in a March 11 blog post. “All they really have as evidence is that Dorian trained as a physicist, worked as an engineer, and is reputed to be very intelligent.”

Dorian was the last candidate, the guy they couldn’t rule out, and the guy who wouldn’t talk to them. Goodman and her colleagues had invested a great deal of resources in the investigation, and the pressure not to come up empty-handed must have been enormous. Confirmation bias was clearly a danger. And yet the story was published, based on a hunch, the process of elimination, and a cryptic "confession."

Other things just didn’t add up, either. Why would Satoshi Nakamoto publish under his real birth name when he clearly wants to be anonymous?

Hours after Dorian Nakamoto’s first denial, a computer account known to be linked to the "real" Satoshi Nakamoto became active for the first time in years, to say exactly five words: “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.”

If Newsweek had found the right guy, there likely would have been a vigorous, and perhaps productive, debate about how to balance journalism with privacy. Dorian Nakamoto as Bitcoin inventor would undoubtedly have been a public figure worthy of publicity, but publishing precise details about his home and car seemed to invite harassment without adding much to the story. But the privacy debate that could have happened has been subsumed by an accuracy debate.

The best defense...

Newsweek’s reaction has been as remarkable as the controversy itself.

If Goodman has mystery evidence supporting the Dorian Nakamoto theory, it should have been revealed days ago.

Goodman quickly got defensive about the story. She was combative on Bloomberg TV; on CBS, she said Nakamoto was changing his story. “Seeing him flee a scene and now deny it, I have to say, it’s mystifying to me,” she said. “I think at this point he’s saying he was confused by the conversation. But I’ve also heard various stories—he’s told people he was confused now about it being a question about [former employer] Quotron and about confidentiality. There’s a couple different versions I’ve heard.”

Both Goodman and editor Jim Impoco have taken umbrage at questions about their work. Newsweek published a statement standing by the story. “This was textbook reporting,” said Impoco when approached by PandoDaily at SXSW. Questions about getting the wrong guy were “phenomenally offensive,” he said. "We eliminated every other possible person," he added—rather unwisely.

Monday, when Nakamoto issued a public statement through his lawyer (but without sending a copy to the magazine), Newsweek rather tetchily responded, "Newsweek has not received any statement or letter from either Mr. Nakamoto or his legal counsel. If and when we do, we will respond as necessary."

Goodman and Impoco want the benefit of the doubt in a way that doesn’t really happen in the more connected world of the Internet. “Goodman feels that she should be given the respect due a serious and reputable investigative journalist, working for a serious and reputable publication,” wrote Felix Salmon, who spoke to her for two hours about her reporting.

Talking with Salmon, Goodman said she has an “enormous amount of evidence, including evidence which is not public,” persuading her that Dorian Nakamoto is the right guy. “Goodman has not decided whether or how she might publish that evidence… What’s more, she has also made it clear that she was in possession of evidence which other journalists could not obtain,” Salmon wrote.

And that’s a problem, because many aspects of the story already look like a caricature of journalism gone awry. The man Goodman fingered as being worth $400 million or more is just as modest as his house suggests. He’s had a stroke and struggles with other health issues. Unemployed since 2001, he strives to take care of basic needs for himself and his 93-year-old mother, according to a reddit post by his brother Arthur Nakamoto (whom Goodman quoted as calling his brother an “asshole”).

If Goodman has mystery evidence supporting the Dorian Nakamoto theory, it should have been revealed days ago. Otherwise, Newsweek and Goodman are delaying an inevitable comeuppance and doubling down on past mistakes. Nakamoto’s multiple denials on the record have changed the dynamic of the story. Standing by the story, at this point, is an attack on him and his credibility.

The Dorian Nakamoto story is a “Dewey beats Truman” moment for the Internet age, with all of the hubris and none of the humor. It shouldn’t be allowed to end in the mists of “he said, she said.” Whether or not a lawsuit gets filed, Nakamoto v. Newsweek faces an imminent verdict in the court of public opinion: either the man is lying or the magazine is wrong.