Pepesso

In his youth, Len was a self-taught technologist who gravitated towards cryptography and protocol development. By 18, Len was on the Internet Engineering Task Force responsible for the TCP/IP protocol underlying the Internet and later the Bitcoin network.

In 1999, Len moved to the Bay Area with Bram Cohen, the creator of Mojo and BitTorrent, and joined the Cypherpunks. There he found a mentor, David Chaum, the man who invented blockchain. Not a bad start to be the Bitcoin creator, is it?

By 22, he was presenting at conferences and had founded a public key crypto startup with famous open-source activist Bruce Perens. After the startup collapsed in the wake of the Dot-com Bubble, Len joined Network Associates to help develop PGP encryption, which is the basis for Bitcoin.

At Network Associates, Sassman closely worked with Hal Finney. Finney was also the earliest and most important contributor to Bitcoin after Satoshi: ❖ Finney was the first recipient of Bitcoin ❖ Finney was the first person other than Satoshi to contribute to Bitcoin’s code and to run a Bitcoin node Later, Hal Finney repeatedly denied that he was Satoshi.

Len and Finney shared one very rare and relevant skillset: they were both developers of the remailer technology, a precursor to Bitcoin. Remailers are specialized servers for sending information anonymously or pseudonymously. Remailers like Mixmaster relied on decentralized nodes to distribute fixed-sized blocks of encrypted info across a P2P network.

That was very similar to Bitcoin's architecture, based on a fully P2P, distributed network. In order to create Bitcoin, Satoshi would have needed to "understand economics, cryptography, and P2P networking." And Len had an unusually early and intimate exposure to all three, along with their application to digital currency.

During Bitcoin’s development, Len was living in Belgium. This is salient given that a number of facts suggest that Satoshi was based in Europe. Bitcoin’s Genesis Block also included a headline from that day’s copy of The Times newspaper. This headline was specific to the print version, which was only circulated in the UK and Europe.

These clues present a paradox: they imply Satoshi was European, but someone with the necessary skills and exposure to Bitcoin's main influences would likely be American. Interestingly, Len, despite being American, used the same British English as Satoshi.

And when we examine Len’s tweet history, we see that the timestamps of Satoshi’s posts and code commits correspond closely to Len’s own hours of Twitter activity.

Satoshi disappeared just months before Len's death. In 2011, Len passed away by suicide at the age of 31. A memorial to him was encoded into the Bitcoin blockchain, describing Sassaman as “a friend, a kind soul, and a devious schemer.”

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