Who was Len Sassaman, and why might HBO think he is Satoshi Nakamoto?

Deceased computer scientist and privacy advocate Len Sassaman is unexpectedly in the limelight as bettors speculate on the upcoming HBO documentary that advertises itself as revealing the identity of the inventor of Bitcoin.

Whether he was the real Satoshi Nakamoto or not, Sassaman was an interesting character.

A troubled prodigy

Information about Leonard Harris Sassaman’s early life is scant. He attended a tony private school in his native state of Pennsylvania and was a cryptography wunderkind, according to multiple accounts.

While still in his late teens, Sassaman was drawn to San Francisco, California, and fell in with the cypherpunks — computer privacy pioneers who formed something of a movement in the late 1980s. He eventually went on to study under blockchain inventor David Chaum.

Sassaman worked on such projects as the Pretty Good Privacy software and its update GNU Privacy Guard. He and his wife, computer scientist Meredith Patterson, founded the SaaS startup Osogato.

Sassaman was a doctoral student in electrical engineering at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium when he died by suicide on July 3, 2011, at the age of 31. A memorial to him was encoded into Block 138725 of the Bitcoin blockchain.

*Tribute to Len Sassaman on the Bitcoin blockchain. Source: Evan Leung Hatch*

Len “Satoshi Nakamoto” Sassaman?

Sassaman and Patterson married in 2006, and they remained married until his death. Patterson has stated that she does not believe her husband was Satoshi Nakamoto.

There is circumstantial evidence to support the theory that Sassaman was Nakamoto. Sassaman left behind an impressive list of publications, conference presentations and other academic activity — certainly enough to convince a nonspecialist of his capability of inventing Bitcoin. He was a member of the International Financial Cryptography Association and regularly spoke on financial cryptography.

Among other circumstantial evidence, linguistic analysis provides evidence that Sassaman could be Bitcoin’s inventor. Nakamoto went silent two months before Sassaman’s death.