All you people talking about violent crime .., I mean, what, do you think the Bloods and the Crips are following the world of bitcoin? I think the bigger story here, much more interesting than whether this person is Santoshi, is the kind of sociological story of nerd obsession with and belief systems about Bitcoin.
So first of all some background: I grew up during the fall of USSR. Our family had little liquid money, but my dad had a 386 computer (this was early 90s) provided by an American firm. My parents told me to never disclose that fact to others for a simple reason: people will assume we have far more money than we actually do (386s were not cheap!, most of my classmates had Sinclairs, Elektronika's, and XTs), we'll suffer a home invasion, and -- this was very common in former USSR republics in early 90s -- torture in search of that money that we don't have. When you hear stories of people being tortured with soldering irons and blow torches on regular news, you tend to become immensely paranoid about sums much smaller than $400mm and concepts much more technical than Bitcoin (as in, differences between various makes of processors!)
The criminals don't think "Bitcoin, the neat crypto-currency, let's hack his network and steal his private keys if we can!". Criminals think "wow, this guy has something that can be exchanged for $400mm, let's hold a clothes iron to his (or his mother's!) feet until he gives it to us!".
LA gangs contain a lot of people of which at least a few will be clued up on Bitcoin. And quite a lot more will be clued up now Dorian has hit main stream news.
Also a few desperate out of work in heavy debt old IT workers might do something stupid.
But I would be mostly worried about the mob. Italian and Russian mafia is reputed to create a large part of their wealth today by online scams and phishing, so they will have people that are fully aware of Bitcoin. And have no qualms visiting people or their relatives to chop off a few fingers.
After all I don't think the Silk Road and its compatriots was run by innocent people...
You haven't explain why he and his family should be anymore paranoid by fear than any other moderately wealthy people. Why don't all your mafia people just watch CNBC?
"$400m" is not moderately wealthy, it's extremely wealthy.
Most moderately or even extremely wealthy people are obscure. One of the wealthiest people I've worked for had a saying: "it's good to be wealthy but not famous." He dressed like a slob, drove a generic Japanese car, lived in a moderate house but in Los Altos (i.e., given the money he went for a safer location as opposed to a gigantic house), and so forth... He never once talked about finance issues despite being involved in angel investments, exits, etc... Most importantly, you'd never see his name in a press release much less in a newspaper story (except once I think, where he was referred to as an engineer as opposed to his actual title).
However, Dorian Nakomoto's situation is far worse in that he's perceived as wealthy, but actually isn't: so he can't afford security, lawyers, a gated house (remember, he went through foreclosure -- he can barely afford a house at all!), and so on forth... He's sixty five years old, his mother is 90. He can't run, he's post-stroke so he likely won't be able defend himself even with a firearm. He also has much more at stake than others: he can't simply hand the home invaders or extortionists the money if, e.g., one of his relatives is kidnapped. Is this so hard to understand? Do you personally hate bitcoin so much that you're willing to be an apologist for endangerment of someone who isn't even involved in bitcoin?
