Who is Len Sassaman, the rumored “Satoshi Nakamoto truth”?

Author: Zepan Dongli

Recently, the community has been circulating that the HBO documentary that will premiere next week may reveal the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. Currently, the Polymarket related prediction market shows that most people bet on Len Sassaman as a strong candidate for Satoshi Nakamoto. The following will introduce you to Len Sassaman and analyze why he is considered by many to be Satoshi Nakamoto himself.

Will the identity of the mysterious creator of Bitcoin "Satoshi Nakamoto" be revealed next week? On Thursday, well-known documentary producer Cullen Hoback promoted his new work "Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery" on the X platform, which will premiere on HBO and Max on October 8, and hinted that the film may reveal who "Satoshi Nakamoto" is.

As soon as the news came out, the popular on-chain prediction platform Polymarket immediately appeared with corresponding bets. The latest data shows that as many as 61.5% of the prediction market bets that "Satoshi Nakamoto" himself is Len Sassaman. Who is he? Why do most people in Polymarket predict that he is the real Satoshi Nakamoto? The following will explain it to you.

Who is Len Sassaman?

The late Len Sassaman, a famous American cryptographer, was one of the earliest advocates of the Cypherpunks movement. He was committed to the development of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption software and open source privacy technology. He was a doctoral student in electrical engineering at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. He studied P2P networks under the guidance of David Chaum, the inventor of digital cash, and was also the maintainer and main developer of the Mixmaster anonymous email forwarder code.

According to his wife, a computer scientist, he committed suicide on July 3, 2011 at the age of 31. Bitcoin block 138,725 contains a transaction in the form of ASCII art to pay tribute to Sassaman.

Four reasons why Len Sassaman may be Satoshi Nakamoto

The speculation that Len Sassaman is Satoshi Nakamoto was mainly put forward by Evan Leung Hatch, who put forward some indirect evidence in an article to try to prove his speculation.

1. Sassaman's suicide in July 2021 was related to the last message Satoshi Nakamoto posted two months ago, when he wrote: "I have moved on to other things and may not appear in the future."

2. Sassaman is likely to be a direct contributor to Bitcoin:

Because Bitcoin is the result of decades of research and discussion in the Cypherpunks community, Sassaman is also one of the important early contributors to Cypherpunks. He was also a roommate of Bram Cohen, the founder of Bittorrent and Chia. Satoshi Nakamoto and Cohen were both early members of the well-known Cypherpunks mailing list.

Sassaman is also known as an authority in public key cryptography, which is the foundation of Bitcoin technology. He co-founded an encryption startup with Bruce Perens, a well-known open source activist.

3. Worked with the late Hal Finney, an early Bitcoin developer, on PGP, the cryptographic technology at the heart of Bitcoin. Both Sassaman and Finney were also developers of the anonymous email forwarder technology that was a precursor to Bitcoin.

According to him, Finney is:

• The first person other than Satoshi to contribute to the Bitcoin code and run a Bitcoin node.

• The first recipient of Bitcoin (sent by Satoshi himself).

• Invented the concept of reusable proof of work, the basis for Bitcoin mining.

• Before the release of Bitcoin, Nakamoto had extensive communications with Finney, and Nakamoto also publicly expressed his respect for Finney in a post.

4. In addition, Sassaman, an American, also uses the same British English as Satoshi, who claims to be of Japanese descent. Since Sassaman was doing research in Belgium at the time of Bitcoin development, this is prominent given that many facts indicate that Nakamoto was in Europe at the time.

Whether the HBO documentary next week will reveal the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, and whether Satoshi Nakamoto himself is Len Sassaman, let us wait and see!