Patrick McKenzie

And you can look for the metadata.

This is actually how a lot of frauds are discovered because the fraud is like basically the definition of fraud is you're telling someone a story.

The story alleges the fact about the world.

The story is not true.

And you're using the story to extract value from them.

Most frauds will allege facts about the physical world.

As the physical world gets more and more mediated by computers, as it gets increasingly sharded between different institutions, there will often be institutions who are not under control of the fraudster,

who have information available to them, which will very dispositively answer the question of whether the alleged fact happened or not.

And as a reporter, understanding how institutions and society interact with each other and the physical reality of, okay, if this thing happens as alleged, then these papers will be filed, then these API calls will be made, et cetera, et cetera.

And then, you know, like doing the core job of reporting and like finding people at the institutions who will tell you the truth.

As an example of this, Mt.

Gox many years ago was insolvent.

And that fact was widely rumored but not reported, presumably because the global financial news industry didn't find it convenient to have someone call into the Japanese banking system and ask the right questions in the right way.

The CEO of Mt.

Gox alleged on Bitcoin Talk that the reason that they were not able to make outgoing wires was because they had caused a distributed denial of service attack on their bank's ability to send foreign currency wires.

That bank was Mizuho.

Mizuho was the second largest bank in Japan.

Many people at, say, well-regarded financial reporting institutions in New York City find it incredibly exotic and difficult and maybe in some ways kind of unknowable to extract fax from Misehole, which there are addresses.

FedEx will deliver letters to them.

They have phone lines.