An HBO documentary, “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery,” due to air on Oct. 8, claims to have unveiled the identity of the creator of the Bitcoin network.
American cypherpunk and cryptographer Leonard Harris “Len” Sassaman is coming up as the top contender.
Sassaman died in July 2011 after committing suicide, and a tribute was encoded into BTC block 138,725 on July 30, 2011, reading:
“This block contains the transaction memorialising American technologist and cryptographer Leonard Harris Sassaman in ASCII art.”
Who Was Len Sassaman?
On Oct. 6, crypto researcher ‘symbiote’ posted his findings on the HBO theory, stating that there are some “tenuous pieces of evidence” that support it.
Sassaman had an impressive academic record and expertise in cryptography. Linguistic analysis suggests similarities between his writing and Satoshi Nakamoto’s, he said before adding:
“The most interesting piece of evidence is that Nakamoto went silent two months before Sassaman’s death.”
Another interesting detail is that his suicide note consisted of 24 random words, which bears a strong resemblance to the 24-word seed phrases used in crypto wallets, he added.
Researcher ‘ardizor’ added some weight to the theory in a post on X on Oct. 6. 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 Pretty Good Privacy software and GNU Privacy Guard.
Sassaman was among the early Bitcoin users which included his friend Hal Finney who was the recipient of the first BTC transaction from Satoshi.
Whether Sassaman is Satoshi remains to be seen, but some would be happier if he remained anonymous.
Big BTC Stash Untouched
Speculators on Polymarket have Sassaman leading the polls with a 36% chance that he is the Bitcoin creator. Other contenders include Hal Finney, Adam Back, and Nick Szabo.
However, Sassaman’s widow said she did not believe that her late husband could have been Bitcoin’s inventor in a post on Twitter in 2021.
The revelation could be a positive for the network and Bitcoin holders because Sassaman is no longer around and the entity claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto holds more than a million BTC across hundreds of addresses which could now remain untouched forever.
