Who is Len Sassaman, the rumored "Satoshi Nakamoto"? Why did everyone vote for him?

Recently, the community has been rumored that the HBO documentary that will premiere next week may reveal the true identity of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. Currently, the Polymarket prediction market shows that most people bet on Len Sassaman as a strong candidate for Satoshi Nakamoto. The following article will introduce you to Len Sassaman and analyze why he is believed 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 film " 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 betting. 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. He 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 paying tribute to Sassaman in ASCII art form.

Four reasons why Len Sassaman might be Satoshi Nakamoto

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

1. Sassaman’s suicide in July 2021 is linked to Satoshi’s last message two months earlier, when he wrote: “I have moved on to other things and may not appear again in the future.”

2. Sassaman is likely 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 the 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 on public key cryptography, the technology that underlies Bitcoin, and he co-founded a crypto startup with renowned open source activist Bruce Perens.

3. He worked with the late Hal Finney, an early Bitcoin developer, on PGP, the encryption technology at the heart of Bitcoin. Sassaman and Finney were also the developers of anonymous email forwarding technology, which was also the predecessor of Bitcoin.

According to him, Finney is:

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

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

• Invented the concept of reusable proof-of-work, which is the basis of Bitcoin mining.

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

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

Will the HBO documentary next week reveal the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto? Will Satoshi Nakamoto himself be Len Sassaman? Let us wait and see!