Crypto Community Talks About Len Sassaman, Was He Satoshi Nakamoto?

An HBO documentary, “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery,” airing Oct. 8, claims to have revealed the identity of the creator of the Bitcoin network.

American cypherpunk and cryptographer Leonard Harris “Len” Sassaman stands as the top candidate.

Sassaman died in July 2011 after committing suicide, and a tribute was encoded on BTC 138,725 block on July 30, 2011, reading:

“This blog contains the transaction remembered by American cryptographer and technologist Leonard Harris Sassaman in ASCII art.”

Who was Len Sassaman?

On October 6, crypto researcher ‘symbiote’ published his findings on the HBO theory, stating that there is some “thin evidence” to support it.

Sassaman had an impressive academic record and expertise in cryptography. Linguistic analysis suggests similarities between his handwriting and that of Satoshi Nakamoto, he said before adding:

“The most interesting evidence is that Nakamoto kept quiet for two months before Sassaman’s death.”

Another interesting detail is that his suicide note consisted of 24 random words, which is very similar to the 24-word seed phrases used in crypto wallets, he added.

This is Len Sassaman, the man who has 64 million dollars $BTC

He might be a Satoshi Nakamoto, the man who created Bitcoin

I spent approximately 10 hours digging through data – I was surprised by the information I found

Here is the story of the biggest crypto billionaire in history pic.twitter.com/WgFCxow75C

— symbiote (@cryptosymbiiote) October 5, 2024

Researcher ‘ardizor’ added some weight to the theory in a post on X on October 6th. From a young age, Len was passionate about privacy, believing the Internet needed protection from surveillance, he said.

He was part of the Internet Engineering Task Force, which contributed to the TCP/IP protocol that underpins the Internet.

Sassaman also contributed to key privacy initiatives, including the Pretty Good Privacy software and GNU Privacy Guard.

Sassaman was an early adopter of Bitcoin, which included his friend Hal Finney, who was the recipient of Satoshi’s first BTC transaction.

Whether Sassaman is Satoshi remains to be seen, but some would be happier if he remained anonymous.

The world is better off not knowing who Satoshi Nakamoto was.

— Anthony Pompliano (@APompliano) October 6, 2024

Big BTC Stash Untouched

Polymarket speculators have Sassaman leading the polls with a 36% chance that he is the creator of Bitcoin. Other contenders include Hal Finney, Adam Back and Nick Szabo.

However, Sassaman’s widow said she did not believe her late husband could have been the inventor of Bitcoin in a 2021 Twitter post.

The revelation could be positive for the network and Bitcoin holders because Sassaman is no more and the entity claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto has over a million BTC in hundreds of addresses that could now remain untouched forever.

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