Will the identity behind Bitcoin ’s mysterious creator “Satoshi Nakamoto” be revealed next week? On Thursday, well-known documentary producer Cullen Hoback promoted his new work " Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery" (Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery), which will premiere on HBO and Max on October 8 on the X platform, and hinted that The film may reveal who "Satoshi Nakamoto" is.
As soon as the news came out, corresponding betting markets appeared on the popular on-chain prediction platform Polymarket. The latest data shows that as many as 61.5% of the prediction market is betting 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 an electrical engineer at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. A doctoral student in engineering, he studies P2P networks under the guidance of David Chaum, the inventor of digital cash. He is also the maintainer and main developer of the Mixmaster anonymous mail 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 transactions that pay homage to Sassaman in an ASCII art form.
Four reasons why Len Sassaman may be Satoshi Nakamoto
The speculation that Len Sassaman is Satoshi Nakamoto was mainly made by Evan Leung Hatch. He put forward some indirect evidence in an article to try to prove his speculation.
1. Sassaman’s suicide in July 2021 is related to the last message released by Satoshi Nakamoto two months ago, when Satoshi Nakamoto wrote: “I have moved on to other things and may not appear again in the future.”
2. Sassaman is likely to be a direct contributor to Bitcoin :
Because Bitcoin is the culmination of decades of accumulated research and discussion in the Cypherpunks community, Sassaman is also one of the early important contributors to Cypherpunks. He was also the roommate of Bram Cohen, the founder of Bittorrent and Chia. Satoshi Nakamoto and Cohen are both Cypherpunks. Early member of a well-known mailing list.
Sassaman is also regarded as an authority on public-key cryptography, which is the basis of Bitcoin technology. He co-founded an encryption startup with noted open source activist Bruce Perens.
3. Worked on the development of PGP with the late early Bitcoin developer Hal Finney . PGP is the core encryption technology of Bitcoin. Sassaman and Finney were both developers of anonymous email forwarder technology, the precursor to Bitcoin.
According to him, Finney is:
- The first person besides 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.
Extended reading: Comrade Satoshi Nakamoto” The late Bitcoin developer “Hal Finney” transferred 46 BTC from his wallet this month. What happened?
4. In addition, Sassaman, who is an American, also uses the same British English as Satoshi Nakamoto, who claims to be of Japanese descent. Since Sassaman was doing research in Belgium at the time of the development of Bitcoin, many facts indicate that Satoshi Nakamoto was located in Europe at the time. , this point is very prominent.
Let us wait and see whether the HBO documentary next week will reveal the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, and whether Satoshi Nakamoto himself is Len Sassaman!
