After Leah McGrath Goodman of Newsweek revealed the true identity of Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto this morning, we here at The Toast realized her reporting, while excellent, left out the real story — namely, Nakamoto’s involvement in the international train modelling (or TraiMod) community.
Two weeks before our meeting in Temple City, I struck up an email correspondence with Satoshi Nakamoto, mostly discussing his interest in upgrading and modifying model steam trains with computer-aided design technologies. I obtained Nakamoto’s email through a company he buys model trains from.
He has been buying train parts from Japan and England since he was a teenager, saying, “I do machining myself, manual lathe, mill, surface grinders.”
And yet after this bombshell of an admission – he’s a home-scale lather — Goodman insists on focusing on Nakamoto’s side work developing play money. The Toast could not let this stand, and contacted Nakamoto at his Temple City home, where he graciously agreed to talk to us over the sound of whistles and station announcements.
“Bitcoin actually started as a way for the tiny passengers on my model trains to purchase refreshments from the eensy-weensy snack cart in Car Seven,” Nakamoto explained, chuckling self-deprecatingly. “I had no idea that it would become such a force of its own.”
What sort of refreshments do you make available to your passengers?
“I’m a real train-snack traditionalist,” Nakamoto said. “Meat pies, Cracker Jacks, ginger beer, Hershey bars, deviled eggs, cold fried chicken, ham sandwiches. Some people just go for the vending-machine stuff, but not me. You might as well build a model monorail system, if you’re going to do that.”
So Bitcoin was never intended to be used outside of the modelling community?
“That’s right,” said Nakamoto. “Frankly, I’m still a little bewildered at how quickly it caught on among non-modders. To hear people who wouldn’t know a stud track from an HO-scale dining car talk about bitcoins is…”
Unsettling?
“Let’s stick with unsettling, yeah,” he said with a laugh. “I was going to go with something a little stronger.”
How important is weathering to your models?
“Oh, hugely,” Nakamoto said. “Hugely. A lot of people don’t understand that railway modelling is as much an art as it is a science. You know, the wear and tear that a freight car accumulates depends not just on age but also the region it’s most frequently used in. So you wouldn’t weather an ausTRAK N-scale the same way you would a Finnish freight. Would the car be likely to experience sandstorms, which can strip paint off the undercarriage in a few hours, is it near cities and towns where car exhaust is likely to settle as layers of grime, is graffiti going to be a factor, that sort of thing.”
How has being publicly identified as the founder of Bitcoin affected your work as a railroad model enthusiast?
Nakamoto sighed heavily. “It’s a distraction. A real distraction. I thought Goodman was really interested on my thesis about the structural differences between the Viessmann/Vollmer models, but all anyone wants to talk about are the damn coins.”
There was a pause, then a choked sob came over the line. “Model Railroader won’t deliver to my house anymore. They say the mail carrier can’t get to the front door anymore, because of the libertarian human chain in the front yard, but I know it’s because they think I’ve given the modding community a bad name. That’s what hurts the most of all.”
Thanks so much for speaking with us. Any closing thoughts?
“Attention, HO-scale passengers. The dining car is closed. Root beer is still available, but the cost is now six-fifty. If the passengers will look to their right, you will see a sad man. That is all.”
Tags: bitcoins, cryptocurrency, inventors, model trains, satire, satoshi nakamoto
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Mallory, help, this is too good and I think I’m dead. Someone hook me up to a G-scale transformer and turn the voltage to “full steam ahead”.
Oh can we have more model train interviews in the future? so great
*sobbing* I don’t know what’s real and what’s not any more
Tomorrow on The Toast, a fanfic about Reverend Lovejoy’s emotional rollercoaster during Springfield’s brief affair with the monorail.
Okay, what’s the bitcoin drama? Can someone fill me in?
Yeah, I linked to it in the first paragraph! Newsweek just identified the founder of Bitcoins!
Whoopsie! Though for some reason that link is telling me I’ve already read my five articles this month (I have not). An alternate for anyone else who can’t get through: http://money.msn.com/investing/post–outrage-disb…
Bitcoin is supposed to be an electronically-based currency that will allow the human race loose the bonds of traditional currency because it has so many amazing advantages. The easiest way to think of it would be to imagine if people started railing about the oppression of round wheels and proposing that true freedom lovers would use square wheels instead. It’s not clear if the original inventors started out with that sales pitch, but it’s the one that has galvanized the glibertarian movement and relieved so many of them of their money.
There are many claims of its awesomeness in comparison with real currencies, such as:
-It will reduce transaction costs (it doesn’t; transaction costs are far higher)
-It will speed the flow of commerce (it doesn’t; it actually tends to be much slower)
-It is not tied to any particular nation state (this is true, but it’s also what causes so many problems and also makes it not-a-currency)
-The lack of regulation will make everything work much better (this obviously false to anyone who knows anything about math, science, business, economics, life, history or common sense; for good examples, look to the skies of China, the killer smog of industrial London back in the day, the housing crisis, the financial crisis, and also maybe Lord of the Flies)
The lack of regulation has led to non-stop scams, leading to tends of millions of dollars being lost overnight. Since there is no larger body backing the currency, it is essentially created out of thin air and also subject to massive swings in value and also very easily drops to its true value of zero. The majority of people trading are doing so as speculators (hello, financial and housing crises, I remember you like it was just yesterday), and not as people engaged in commerce or trading of goods. The lack of regulation also means that it is perfect for laundering money and funding all kinds of stuff like illegal sales of weapons, drugs, people, etc.
Like all pyramid schemes, the people who got in early are making out like bandits, leaving the straggling glibertarians holding the bag. Two large ‘exchanges’ have gone bankrupt in the past two weeks, and a prominent CEO (whose character I’m almost certain was portrayed in an episode of The Good Wife) of another exchange showed up dead overnight. Maybe it’s all fun and games as people’s financial lives are being ruined but, not so much when people start dying. (I generally don’t feel bad for a lot of the idiots involved in this, as this is what one tends to get when one lives their lives according to a shitty misanthropic, dystopian novel).
Yes, everything here.
Also, “glibertarian” is my new favorite word.
Ah. Thank you for background. I remember losing interest in Bitcoin once I realized I would need a server bank to “make” any. I had no idea of any ideological stuff nor that it had gotten so big.
This is a brilliant and clear explanation – thank you! I had a couple of in-the-know tech buddies try to explain the concept of bitcoin to me at a party a few months ago. They tried valiantly, but I just couldn’t GET it. “What’s it backed by?” “Well, nothing, as such…” “Then what makes it real money?” “Well, it’s value is dictated by the market!” “But…how?” It took me a while to realize that the reason I couldn’t get the concept was because there’s nothing TO get – like you said, it’s just a complicated pyramid scheme.
Thank you so much for “glibertarian.” It is perfect.
My boyfriend tends to go off on wild hares, so it was only a matter of time before he latched onto the whole cryptocurrency thing. (I think the grand schemes thing is hereditary; his father was known to do it too) He fell in with Dogecoin, which is one of the other ones, and at first I was extremely concerned over his new obsession. He explained it to me several times, with much arm-waving, and what I gathered is – the money is as real as people want it to be – some people want it to be real – he doesn’t need to spend any money beyond running his computer ALL THE TIME (DEAR GOD THE FANS RUNNING) – and if the “Dogemarket” crashes, he won’t have lost anything except something that I don’t think is real anyways. Honestly, if he is going to obsess over some absurd scheme, I think he’s picked a pretty harmless one.
Remember when Mandy Patinkin was on I Love Toy Trains? http://www.thedailybeast.com/videos/2009/06/13/th…
If the passengers will look to their right, you will see a sad man.
Welp, I am emotionally ruined for the rest of the day.
My ex-step-grandfather was big into model trains in kind of a weird way. They were in the basement, of course. (Train enthusiasts are contractually obligated to keep them in the basement, yes? I’m thinking a basementless house will forcibly birth one the moment a train enthusiast takes up residence.)
As a teen, I was babysitting for a family in a basementless house. The first time they hired me, the father showed me around the house while talking about the kids’ meal and bed routines. I was thinking he was awfully tense, but in a happy way. Turns out, he was eager to show me the last room: an upstairs addition in an otherwise one-story house. He built it himself. It was odd, looked like *the house forcibly birthed* that room up out of its roof. It wasn’t until I saw your comment that I could describe what an odd room it was. Your phrase is perfect. Yes, it was a room he created solely for his model trains.
This is absolutely delightful.
Model train sets can also be housed in attics, provided your attic is big enough. (At least, that’s a rule according to Beetlejuice.)
My bedroom was the train room before I was born (which was apparently my parents’ thing–have a big house party, people can chill in one room with the records, and in another with the toy train. Weirdos) My grandfather used the garage for his railway. Clearly we as a family are half-assing this whole train thing.
Until I got to the line about the human chain I was SO SURE this was real and I was so thrilled
The photo omg the photo is killing me.
My stepfather loved trains to the extent that my high school rebellion was taking up with model toy soldiers [warhammer. 40K, mum liked knights so no knights, because fuck you parents! I do what I want!], and I love this, and it is perfect.
It’s like I’m watching Would I Lie To You? and I’m Lee Mack going “I really, really, REALLY want this to be true.”
And then David Mitchell goes off on some soapboxy rant for no apparent reason, and Rob Brydon is falling into an imaginary freezer and everything goes to hell.
I find myself saying “I really want that to be true” a lot in real life. Thanks, WILTY.
Nakamoto is actually going to sue for defamation- he says that he hasn’t coded a thing in over ten years. His son made the claim, the media ran with it, and he’s publicly stated that he’s been out of a job for so long with health-related issues that he canceled his home internet in ’13.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/dorian-satoshi-n…
It’s kind of sad, especially with the gross invasion of privacy that the stories have caused on him and his family…