Newly outed Dorian Nakamoto has outright denied any involvement with Bitcoin after a Newsweek published an article claiming that he is Bitcoin’s Batman Satoshi Nakamoto. MtGox gets an interesting form on its front page allowing users to log in and view their currency balances on the now defunct exchange. Blockchain.info had some issues staying online this week. Bitcoin adoption in the mobile monetization space continues with a new offering from Vungle.

Welcome to yet another Bitcoin Weekly!

Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto unequivocally denies being part of Bitcoin

The saga of Newsweek and Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto continues with Nakamoto, the center of all this drama, absolutely denying his involvement in Bitcoin.

“I did not create, invent or otherwise work on Bitcoin,” insists Dorian Nakamoto.

As the week wears on since the initial Newsweek article attempting to out Dorian Nakamoto as the mythical Batman-figure founder and inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, news continues to circle around the unlikelihood of Dorian Nakamoto being Satoshi Nakamoto.

Not only has the man denied outright his involvement; but Satoshi has been “discovered” repeatedly by different news outlets and to date, not one of them has been the actual Satoshi. As a result, after the Newsweek article published a lot of people began to question if Dorian Nakamoto could be the Satoshi Nakamoto.

A document surfaced recently attributed to Mike Hearn, a Bitcoin developer and Google Employee. The document puts together a compelling case as to why Dorian Nakamoto is not Satoshi. The document, entitled “The Newsweek Credibility Matrix” puts forward a compelling arugment as to why Newsweek failed in due diligence to vet the likelihood that Dorian Nakamoto is indeed Satoshi.

The evidence is considerable, but winding and extremely contextual, but the conclusion is fairly straightforward.

Possibility 1: Dorian created Bitcoin

Dorian Nakamoto is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. He is a world-class mathematician and cryptographer, despite having shown no traces of these skills in his professional or internet history. He is a deeply private man who anonymized his entire existence with respect to Bitcoin, except chose to use his real name as his internet handle. In every post, review and email he wrote under his real name, Dorian Nakamoto, he declined to employ the most basic English grammar – but when writing hundreds of posts about Bitcoin under the “Satoshi” name, he has completely flawless English. During the three years when he was actively developing Bitcoin, he was also completely devoted to model trains. He’s a 64-year-old Japanese man who uses “WTF”, “AFAIK”, and internet slang like “OP” and “+1”. He is a billionaire, but despite his health problems and enormous family (5+ children, several siblings), he chooses not to use the money.

Possibility 2: Dorian did not create Bitcoin

Dorian Nakamoto is not Satoshi Nakamoto. He did not create Bitcoin. Newsweek is incorrect.

If you’re interested in Hearn’s take on the subject, and the evidence for and against Dorian Nakamoto as Satoshi, read the entire thing.

MtGox wallet check?

Now that the MtGox meltdown and bankruptcy is complete, the failure of bitcoin’s ex-biggest exchange has become recent but old news. However, things are still happening over there that have been catching customers who wonder what happened to their money off guard.

On Monday, a login form and a lot of information appeared on the front page of MtGox.com.  The form contains text that suggests that it can be used to view your account balances.

Speculation has been rife that this might be a hacker attempting to get people’s passwords and information on MtGox but a little sleuthing has been going on in the community. The rumors and confusion come because MtGox is still MtGox even in bankruptcy and the company does not communicate well.

Sleuthing by Redditors has revealed that it is most likely legit, by calling the telephone number set up by MtGox to comply with the legal requirements of the bankruptcy.

Redditor /u/BlockchainOfFools has this to say, “I have called the call center number twice, once using English and once using Japanese, and both times the attendant confirmed that this update was placed here to satisfy a legal request for a method of verifying balances in anticipation of an upcoming claims filing process,” and another Redditor made a thread regarding calling MtGox about transaction history.

The form is most likely legitimate; but while it only reveals balance information and doesn’t give users any capability of getting their money or bitcoins off. As a result, it is possible it’s only useful to update records.

Blockchain.info outage postmortem

Blockchain.info, a major web-wallet for the bitcoin community, suffered some technical issues on Monday, March 17th when the site was taken offline. Since then, the service has been keeping customers and users appraised of what happened and what they’re doing to fix the problems.

Blockchain.info representatives explain in a blog post what to expect,

On Monday March 17th, Blockchain services experienced a series of technical issues that originated from a database error and resulted in suspension of services. The issue was entirely unrelated to the earlier problems with the SharedCoin service; it was simply a timing coincidence. This was not the result of hacking or attacks, or of any suspicious activity. It was simply the result of an obscure bug and a combination of technical factors that expressed this bug under heavy load.

The company is also upkeeping a comment in a Reddit thread updating on the progress of fixes and expected downtime.

The issue that took down Blockchain.info is described as a MySQL database cluster crash involving Error code 625 and 2352. The errors affected several tables that were commonly accessed and specifically those with tracking information that is also contained in the Bitcoin blockchain ledger. Fortunately for Blockchain.info the staff was able to quickly diagnose the problem and bring the affected systems down for repair.

Customer funds and wallets are not at risk for theft or loss—merely suspended whilst repairs happen—and Blockchain.info themselves do not have direct access to customer funds. The blog post also stresses that numerous layers of security that will keep any funds stored on Blockchain.info safe. Also, although Blockchain.info web-wallet services are unavailable due to outage, users can still restore their balances to other Bitcoin clients such as Multibit.

As of Tuesday, March 18th, Blockchain.info’s services have been partially restored including the Blockchain explorer; but a phased approach is being taken with bringing online other services such as the wallet, and other database-related elements.

Blockchain.info’s services have since been fully restored.

Thank you for your patience during our service outage. We understand how frustrating it can be to be unable to access funds and we would like to take every precaution necessary to ensure this does not recur. Our team has worked non-stop to ensure services are returned to you in a timely manner.

In the view of customers affected by a multi-day outage, while not ideal having any outage at all, the amount of communication and transparency displayed by Blockchain.info is extremely good. This especially resonates since the debacle generated by now-defunct bitcoin exchange MtGox.

Vungle adds in-app mobile monetization for bitcoin

The adoption of bitcoin payments into web and mobile continues apace with Vungle’s addition to the monetization space.

In-app purchases and monetization is a huge market for mobile developers because being able to purchase something on-the-fly from a mobile app is the go-to method for making money from mobile (aside form advertising.) In this era, many developers produce apps that are otherwise free to customers who want to use them but withhold premium capabilities behind a paywall, most of the time these capacities can be had for a dollar or two.

With standard systems, a $1 purchase can be melted away by fees and payment overhead to a trickle. To solve this, numerous app stores have attempted to forward their own version of virtual currency from Facebook to Amazon; but with a cryptocurrency such as bitcoin, it could be possible to make a $1 payment in BTC with virtually zero overhead.