Kriti Mehrotra
As a documentary living up to its title in every way conceivable and then some, HBO’s ‘Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery’ gives us a complete insight into the world of cryptocurrency. That’s because it delves into not just the identity of Bitcoin’s anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, but also the origins of this decentralized currency network and the rise of its competitors. However, one of the most interesting names in this whole ordeal, Len Sassaman, was not even mentioned in this original production, making us all the more curious about him and his work.
Len Sassaman Established a Name For Himself At an Early Age
Although a native of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in a relatively middle-class household, Leonard “Len” Harris Sassaman’s parents did their best to provide him with the best of opportunities. That’s how he managed to graduate from the private preparatory boarding school The Hill School at the age of 18 in 1998, only to soon relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area for his career. The truth is, since he had long developed an interest in the world of growing science and technology, he had obtained his degree in the field before becoming a part of the cypherpunk community to promote privacy and individual rights online.
According to records, Len gradually evolved into a full-fledged cryptographer and privacy advocate, resulting in him working with Network Associates on the PGP encryption software. PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy and literally enables users to to have complete privacy in their e-mails, texts, files, etc following authentication. As if that’s not enough, he was even a part of the Shmoo Group, the OpenPGP IETF Group, the GNU Privacy Guard project, and many more such projects as a technologist as well as an information privacy advocate.
The truth is Len’s association with fellow early cryptographers helped him learn more about the technicalities of this industry, soon resulting in him appearing at conferences like DefCon and also co-founding CodeCon. He also co-founded the Hot Topics in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (HotPETs) workshop alongside Roger Dingledine and Thomas Heydt-Benjamin) before starting to work alongside his wife, computer scientist Meredith Patterson (married in 2006), on new projects. In other words, almost all of Len’s work involved cryptography, privacy advancements, and protocol development, aspects he was extremely passionate about.
Len Sassaman is Believed By Many to Be Satoshi Nakamoto
Even though Len was born in the US, he’d been a resident of Leuven in Flemish Brabant, Belgium, from around the late 2000s when Bitcoin was being developed. Therefore, many do believe that Santoshi’s British-English writing style on his papers and his forum was a deliberate effort made by the privacy advocate to throw people off his scent for more reasons than one. Furthermore, what also fuels speculation is his association with some prominent early cryptocurrency/Bitcoin developers, right along with his work on a key precursor to the latter network, remailer technology.
The fact he unfortunately passed away in 2011, right around the same time Satoshi sent his final confirmed email to the Bitcoin community on April 23, 2011, also makes him fit the bill. However, his widow maintains that as far as she knows, he was a simple man with simple needs, and there is no way he could have been Bitcoin’s founder despite his genius and countless accolades. “The best case against him being Satoshi is some newbie mistakes in the design of the original protocol, like being able to send to an IP address,” she recently told DL News. She had also already once said that her husband was “a Mac user” and Bitcoin was a Linux product in the early days.
Len Sassaman Died of Suicide in 2011
According to Len’s widow, technologist, science fiction writer, journalist, and computer scientist Meredith Patterson, he died on July 3, 2011, at the age of 31 from suicide. He had reportedly been diagnosed with depression back when he was just a teenager and had continued struggling with his mental health until he seemingly couldn’t take it anymore. Meredith has never made the details of his demise public owing to privacy reasons as she continues to respect and honor his memory in every way she can, so we are not going to speculate either. All we will reveal is that she now serves as the Chief Technological Officer at Special Circumstances LLC and at Mautinoa Technologies, where she continues her and Len’s work in the financial technology world.
Read More: Nick Szabo: Where is the Cryptographer Now?
