Foreword: According to politico, a new HBO documentary claims to have cracked the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, but HBO’s promotional copy does not explicitly make this claim. Those most commonly suspected of being Satoshi Nakamoto include the late software engineer Hal Finney, systems engineer Dorian Nakamoto, computer scientist Nick Szabo and the inventor of Hashcash Adam Back.
However, Len Sassaman is currently ranked number one on the prediction site, way ahead of everyone else. Who exactly is Len Sassaman is fully described in this article.
We have lost too many hackers to suicide. What if Satoshi was one of them?
In every Bitcoin node, there is an obituary embedded. This obituary was embedded in the transaction data and became a memorial to Len Sassaman – a man who was almost immortalized on the blockchain. This commemoration couldn’t be more appropriate.
Len is a true cryptopunk—smart, fearless, and idealistic all at the same time. He has devoted his life to defending personal freedom through cryptography. He has participated in the development of PGP encryption and open source privacy technology, and as an academic cryptographer, he studied P2P networks under the guidance of blockchain inventor David Chaum.
He is also a pillar of the hacker community: a friend and influencer of many important figures in the history of information security and cryptocurrency.
Losing Satoshi
By all accounts, Len would have become one of the most important cryptographers of his time. But on July 3, 2011, he tragically took his own life at the age of 31 after battling long-term depression and functional neurological impairment.
His death coincides with the disappearance of the world's most famous cryptopunk, Satoshi Nakamoto. Two months before Len's death, Satoshi sent their last correspondence:
I have moved on to other things and may not be around again.
After 169 code commits and 539 posts in one year, Satoshi disappeared without explanation. They left behind a pile of unfinished features, a heated debate about their vision for Bitcoin, and a BTC fortune worth $64 billion that remains untouched.
We've lost too many hackers to suicide. Aaron Swartz, Gene Kan, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, James Dolan. They are all victims of an epidemic of shame and melancholy that is also taking its toll on technological progress itself. Imagine if the creator of Bitcoin died before completing it. If that were true, what would they bring to the world if they were given the care and respect they deserve?
I hesitate to speculate on Satoshi's identity because discussions surrounding the subject often range from misguided to ridiculous and even unethical. However, with Craig Wright falsely claiming to be the creator of Bitcoin, it’s worth revisiting the topic and putting the focus back on the cyberpunks who actually built Bitcoin.
No matter who Satoshi is, they are undoubtedly "standing on the shoulders of giants" - Bitcoin is the cumulative result of decades of research and discussion in the cryptopunk community. In this sense, Len is certainly an indirect contributor. But we still have to ask, who wrote the code, ran the first node, and published content under the pseudonym Satoshi?
In order to synthesize and implement the many ideas on which Bitcoin is based, that person or team must have unique expertise spanning multiple fields such as public key infrastructure, academic cryptography, P2P network design, practical security architecture, and privacy technology. They are likely to be deeply rooted in the cryptopunk community and have strong ties to figures who have had a significant impact on cryptocurrencies. Finally, they need ideological firmness and hacker spirit to "roll up their sleeves" and anonymously construct a real-world system that has previously remained in the realm of theory.
When I look back on Len's life, I see many of the same traits. I think Len was probably one of the direct contributors to Bitcoin.
With cryptocurrencies receiving unprecedented attention, I hope to bring more awareness to the “unsung heroes” we should be grateful for. I also hope that we will reflect on how important it is to pay attention to mental illness, especially those functional neurological disorders that should receive more attention.
origin
Even as a young man, Len was a self-taught technologist specializing in cryptography and protocol development. Although he lived in a small town in Pennsylvania, by the age of 18, Len had joined the Internet Engineering Task Force responsible for the Internet's foundational TCP/IP protocol, which later became the Bitcoin network. the basis of.
"I always looked a little special because I was smart." Len was diagnosed with depression in his teenage years. Unfortunately, he experienced traumatic treatment by a psychiatrist that "bordered on abuse" during treatment, an experience that may have left him with a deep distrust of so-called authority figures.
In 1999, Len moved to the Bay Area and quickly became a fixture in the cryptopunk community. He lived with Mojo and Bittorrent creator Bram Cohen and contributed to the legendary cryptopunk mailing list where Satoshi first announced Bitcoin. Other hackers remember him as a man with a smart sense of humor who chased squirrels at a cryptopunk party and drove a sports car with a "get out of jail free card" in case he was pulled over by the police. Use next time.
In San Francisco, Len is dedicated to defending personal freedoms and privacy through direct action through technology and politics. At 21, he made headlines for organizing protests against government surveillance and supporting the jailing of hacker Dmitri Skylarov.
PGP
Early in his career, Len distinguished himself as an authority on public-key cryptography, which is the foundation of Bitcoin. By 22, he was already speaking at conferences and founding a public-key cryptography startup with noted open source activist Bruce Perens.
After the startup collapsed in the dot-com bust, Len joined Network Associates to help develop PGP encryption, which was critical to Bitcoin. In 2001, during the release of PGP7, Len was responsible for setting the interoperability tests for the OpenPGP implementation, which brought him into contact with many important cryptography pioneers. Len also contributed to the OpenPGP implementation of GNU Privacy Guard and invented a new encryption protocol with PGP inventor Phil Zimmerman.
When introducing Bitcoin, Satoshi said he hoped Bitcoin would become "the same thing in currency" that strong cryptography, such as PGP, plays in file security.
A few generations ago, multi-user time-sharing computer systems faced similar problems. Before the advent of strong encryption, users had to rely on password protection…
Then strong encryption started to spread to the masses and trust was no longer necessary... Now, it's time to have the same thing in the currency world.
Hal Finney
At Network Associates, Len worked with Hal Finney on PGP. Finney was the second developer of PGP and helped create RFC 4880, the OpenPGP interoperability standard. He is also the earliest and most important Bitcoin contributor after Satoshi:
● Finney was the first person besides Satoshi to contribute to the Bitcoin code and run a Bitcoin node.
● Finney was the first recipient of Bitcoin (sent to him by Satoshi himself).
● Finney invented the concept of “Reusable Proofs of Work” on which Bitcoin mining is based.
●Satoshi communicated extensively with Finney before Bitcoin was released. In their last few interactions, Satoshi openly expressed his respect for Finney.
Not surprisingly, Finney is one of the most popular Satoshi candidates, even though this means he needs to fake numerous email interactions with Satoshi while contributing to Bitcoin under both his real and fake identities. In addition, Finney continued to work for Bitcoin after Satoshi "left" in 2011.
remailer
Len and Finney share a very rare and relevant skill: they are both developers of remailer technology, one of the precursors to Bitcoin.
Introduced by David Chaum along with cryptocurrencies, remailers are specialized servers used to send messages anonymously or pseudo-anonymously. The use of remailers is very common when participating in cryptopunk mailing lists, which themselves are built on decentralized remailers.
Block diagram of the Type II remailer
Early remailers simply forwarded the message and masked the identity of the sender, while later protocols, such as the popular Mixmaster remailer, relied on decentralized nodes to distribute fixed-size encrypted message blocks over the P2P network. Bitcoin's architecture is very similar to a remailer, except that its nodes transmit transaction data rather than messages. In 1997, crypto-anarchist founder Tim May even proposed a digital currency based on remailers.
As the lead developer, node operator, and primary maintainer of Mixmaster, Len is a leading expert in remailer technology. He also worked as a systems engineer and security architect on the Anonymizer privacy protection project, implementing similar technologies.
The remailer is not only a direct precursor to Bitcoin technology, but also fundamental to its intellectual history. In the article (Why Remailers), Finney argues that remailers are the foundation of the anonymous digital economy.
The remailer is the "base layer" of this intellectual edifice—it gives us the ability to exchange messages privately without revealing our true identities. This way we can conduct transactions, present credentials, and reach agreements without having to worry about government or corporate databases tracking our every step.
One of the cryptopunk visions includes being able to conduct transactions anonymously, using "digital cash." …This is another area where anonymous email plays an important role.
The operators of remailers were among the first to realize the need for cryptocurrencies: due to the lack of anonymous payment methods, remailers had to operate at their own expense. This raises scalability issues and also causes spam and abuse issues to become the norm. Because of this, the basic concept of many cryptocurrencies stems from the need to create an abuse-resistant, for-profit remailer:
● In 1994, Finney proposed that remailers could be monetized through anonymous "coins" and "cash tokens."
●The first discussion of smart contracts was in the context of preventing abuse of remailers. Nick Szabo's forward-thinking smart contract paper from 1997 specifically mentioned Mixmaster.
● Ian Goldberg and Ryan Lackey (two important people known to Len) are the main figures in the remailer community. They developed an unfinished cryptocurrency called HINDE in 1998. Ian went on to create several early electronic cash clients, while Ryan became Tezos' chief security officer.
Therefore, Satoshi's second article on Bitcoin mentioned that "paying to send emails" was the first practical use case of Bitcoin.
Initially, it can be used in nearly free proof-of-work applications.
It can already be used to send emails for a fee. The send dialog is resizable and you can enter a message of any length.
Adam Back
In the small remailer community, Len also interacted with Blockstream CEO Adam Back - the first person to communicate with Satoshi.
Back's interest in cryptocurrencies stemmed from running remailers, and he invented the HashCash proof-of-work system for remailers to use to combat spam and DDoS attacks. Satoshi later used HashCash as the basis for Bitcoin mining.
We know that Len worked directly with Back, who is listed as a contributor to one of Len's research papers and a Mixmaster memo. They all participate in multiple OpenPGP implementation projects and are related to each other in each other's PGP web of trust.
Interestingly, Back himself has hinted that Satoshi may be a remailer developer, noting that these developers "[practice] their own technology" and participate in encryption protocol discussions in a pseudo-anonymous manner. Unlike many of the Cyberpunk figures in question, we know that Len has contributed extensively, pseudo-anonymously, via a remailer on the Cyberpunk mailing list.
Chaum and COSIC
After high school, Len worked to support his family and never had the opportunity to attend college. However, in 2004, he managed to land his "dream job" as a researcher and PhD candidate at the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography Research Group (COSIC) at KU Leuven in Belgium.
At COSIC, Len’s doctoral supervisor was David Chaum, the “father of digital currency”. While Chaum laid the foundation for the entire cyberpunk movement and all cryptocurrencies, few can claim to have worked directly with him.
Several of Chaum's key accomplishments include:
●Cryptocurrency was invented in the paper (Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments) published in 1983.
●Invented the blockchain in his 1982 doctoral thesis, which described all but one of the elements of the blockchain in the Bitcoin white paper.
●He created Digicash, the first electronic cash system. Anonymous payment between digital avatars is his core vision.
“[Chaum] is at the center of a seemingly unstoppable movement—the digitization of money…The unknown variable in the era of digital currency is anonymity, and David Chaum believes that without anonymity, we will be in trouble.”
While Digicash failed (in part because of its reliance on a centralized system), Chaum hopes to create a second digital currency that can provide both anonymity and utility.
Although many saw its failure as evidence that digital cash is not viable, Satoshi defended the "old Chaum currency" while acknowledging the centralization issues that plague it.
Many people automatically view electronic money as a hopeless endeavor because all related companies have failed since the 1990s. I hope it's obvious that those systems failed simply because of their centralized nature.
Len's Research
Len worked at COSIC in Belgium until his death in 2011. During this time, he amassed a distinguished record of 45 publications and 20 conference committee positions.
Len's research focuses on developing and writing actual code for privacy-enhancing protocols with "real-world applicability." His main project is Pynchon Gate, a collaboration with Bram Cohen, an evolution of remailer technology that enables pseudo-anonymous information retrieval through a decentralized network of nodes without trusting a third party.
Pynchon Gate and meta-index + bucket pool architecture
This project is closely related to Bitcoin - as the research on Pynchon Gate progressed, Len gradually focused on solving the Byzantine problem, which was one of the main obstacles in the early P2P network.
Diagram of the Byzantine Problem
In the context of decentralized computing, Byzantine fault tolerance refers to the ability of a network to remain functional even if a node is destroyed or becomes unreliable. The Byzantine problem is one of the biggest problems that needs to be solved to ensure that cryptocurrency systems can be secure and decentralized without double spending or trusting third parties. Satoshi's most important innovation was to propose a "triple accounting" system through the introduction of the blockchain proposed by Chaum, which successfully solved this problem.
During the development of Bitcoin in 2008–2010, Len became increasingly active in the field of financial cryptography. He has joined the International Financial Cryptozoology Association and has spoken at the Financial Cryptozoology and Data Conference and also serves as a committee member. The conference was founded by Robert Hettinga, an early advocate of digital cash, and digital cash was one of the main topics of discussion at the conference.
Satoshi as a scholar
Numerous clues suggest that Satoshi may have been working in academia during the development of Bitcoin, a view supported by the founder of the Bitcoin Foundation, Gavin Andersen.
"I thought he was an academic, maybe a postdoctoral fellow, or a professor who didn't want to attract attention."
Satoshi's code contributions and comments increase significantly during the summer and winter holidays, but decrease significantly during the final exam period in late spring and at the end of the year, which is consistent with academics having more time during the holidays and being busy with exams or grading at the end of the semester.
The unique structure of Bitcoin's code also points to Satoshi's academic background. The code was described as "brilliant but not rigorous" and did not employ conventional software development practices like unit testing, but demonstrated cutting-edge security architecture and a deep understanding of academic cryptography and economics.
This person has a deep understanding of cryptography... they've read academic papers, have a sharp intellect, and combine these concepts in truly innovative ways.
When renowned security researcher Dan Kaminsky first reviewed Satoshi's code, he tried penetration testing with nine different vulnerabilities, but to his surprise, Satoshi had already anticipated and patched the issues.
"I design beautiful exploits, but every time I attack the code, there's a line in the code that addresses the problem... I've never seen anything like this."
This may indicate that Satoshi and Kaminsky share similar information security experience and expertise. Coincidentally, Len and Kaminsky co-authored and published a paper demonstrating methods of attacking public key infrastructure.
Furthermore, the Bitcoin white paper is published in a format not commonly seen on the Cyberpunk mailing list – it is a LaTeX-formatted research paper with academic features such as abstract, conclusion, and MLA citation format. This contrasts with the irregular blog posting style of other proposals such as Bitgold and b-money.
Satoshi in Europe
Since COSIC was based in Leuven, Len lived in Belgium during the development of Bitcoin. That's important because some facts suggest Satoshi may also be in Europe, which was a major focus of the (New Yorker's) early investigation.
Satoshi's writing style features typical British English spelling and word usage such as "bloody difficult", "flat", "maths", "grey", and Date format of dd /mm/yyyy. However, Satoshi also mentioned the euro rather than the pound.
Bitcoin’s genesis block also contains a headline from that day (“The Times January 3, 2009: Chancellor on edge of second bank bailout”). The title refers specifically to that day's print edition, which is only distributed in the UK and Europe. In 2009, The Times was among the top ten newspapers in Belgium and is widely used by academics and researchers due to its wide availability in libraries and detailed indexing system.
These clues present a paradox: they suggest Satoshi is European, but the person with the skills needed for Bitcoin and access to its major influence is more likely to be American. Most of the conferences and gatherings of the cyberpunk community are concentrated in the United States, especially San Francisco, so many important figures are from the United States. Job opportunities for gaining experience in cutting-edge information security and encryption technologies are also mostly concentrated in the United States.
Oddly, even though Len is American, his use of British English is exactly the same as Satoshi's.
An analysis of Satoshi's posting history shows that he is a European "night owl" who usually devotes himself to Bitcoin development work after finishing work or school during the day. At one point, Satoshi mentioned that the increase in mining difficulty happened “yesterday,” which obviously wouldn’t be true if he lived in the United States.
Assuming Satoshi has a life beyond Bitcoin, he leaves his home computer during the day while working or studying... If Satoshi lives in the British Summer Time (BST) time zone, he mostly works at night, usually until the early morning hours.
When we look at Len's tweet history, we can see that Satoshi's posting times and code commit times are very close to Len's late-night activity.
P2P network
While Bitcoin is not the first cryptocurrency, it is the first to be based on a fully P2P decentralized network. Satoshi emphasized this point when he first mentioned Bitcoin:
I have been developing a brand new electronic cash system that is completely peer-to-peer and does not rely on any trusted third parties.
Dan Kaminsky said that to build Bitcoin, Satoshi had to "understand economics, cryptography, and P2P networks," and Len had unusual early exposure and deep understanding of these three and their application in digital currencies.
Bram and Len pictured during the CodeCon interview
While in San Francisco, Len lived and worked with Bram Cohen, the creator of the P2P protocol BitTorrent. Between 2000 and 2002, Bram developed a revolutionary P2P network called MojoNation, which used "Mojo Tokens" as a digital currency, making it one of the first publicly released digital currencies.
In MojoNation's P2P economy, tokens can be used to exchange file storage. The files will be encrypted and encoded into "blocks", uploaded to the distributed node network, and recorded on a public ledger, which is consistent with Bitcoin's distributed There are similarities in bilateral accounting systems. Mojo is not just an internal accounting token, but a full currency – convertible into USD and vice versa. Some of the earliest token economic discussions centered around the mechanics of the Mojo token.
A Mojo represents part of the overall capabilities of the current system. If you work for me now, I'll give you points, and in the future when the network gets bigger, those points will represent part of a bigger pie, so their value will increase as you use them.
Satoshi discusses token economics in a similar way:
It has the potential to create a positive feedback loop; as the number of users increases, the value rises, which may attract more users to take advantage of this growing value.
Despite MojoNation's vision, its economic system quickly collapsed due to hyperinflation. Satoshi deliberately designed Bitcoin to avoid this fate, ensuring its stability through a built-in deflation mechanism and no reliance on a central "minting" server.
In 2001, Bram launched BitTorrent. As a P2P alternative to Napster, BitTorrent foreshadowed Bitcoin's own decentralized node topology, consensus system, and protocol-level incentives. BitTorrent not only innovates networks like Gnutella technically, it also drives design through economic incentives and game theory.
BitTorrent Design Versus Napster
Presciently, Len once told Bram: "BitTorrent will make you more famous than [Napster founder] Sean Fanning." Satoshi later mentioned Napster to explain the need for a fully decentralized network.
Governments are good at cutting off the heads of centralized networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be self-sustaining.
Coincidentally, Len and Tor founder Roger Dingledine both participated in the development of the Mixminion remailer protocol, and the two also co-demoed it at the Black Hat conference and co-founded the HotPETS conference.
In 2002, Len and Bram co-founded a conference called CodeCon that focused on "projects with actual working code." At CodeCon 2005, Finney demonstrated Reusable Proof-of-Work (RPOW) via a modified BitTorrent client that could send P2P digital currency. One commenter described it as:
…the world’s first transparent server that enables a decentralized, cooperative world of RPOW servers.
Digital currencies were a big theme at the inaugural CodeCon, which also featured demonstrations of Adam Back's HashCash and Zooko's demo of Mnet, a fully open source and decentralized successor to MojoNation. MojoNation is not tied to a single company and can be independently audited, both attributes that Satoshi considers crucial.
Screenshot of Mnet client
MojoNation co-founders Zooko Wilcox and Jim McCoy are also influential in the cryptocurrency space. Zooko was one of Satoshi's early collaborators and worked for David Chaum's Digicash. When Bitcoin v0.1 was released, Satoshi also linked to Zooko's blog on Bitcoin.org. Zooko later founded the privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash and proposed the much-discussed "Zooko Triangle" framework.
"Zooko's Triangle" is a trilemma concerning three ideal properties of participant names in network protocols.
McCoy is also a major influencer in the cryptocurrency space, with Digital Currency Group’s Ryan Selkis even saying he believes McCoy could be Satoshi.
hacktivism
Even by the standards of the cyberpunk community, both Len and Satoshi exhibit particularly strong ideological convictions and a strong commitment to open knowledge.
I hope you won't talk about me all the time... maybe focus on open source projects and give more recognition to developer contributors.
Satoshi's "hacktivist" approach to distributing Bitcoin through a free, open-source grassroots project stands in stark contrast to their predecessors. Chaum, Stefan Brand, eCash and others are taking a completely different approach: filing for patents, launching closed-source venture capital firms, and trying to drive adoption through corporate partnerships.
This approach has similarities to Len's own extensive contributions to open source projects, such as his contributions to PGP, Mixmaster, GNU Privacy Guard, etc., as well as his volunteer work experience with organizations such as the Shmoo Group.
For this story, Bram said Len had a preference for anonymous publishing
Satoshi mentioned their ideological leanings in several remarks, saying that Bitcoin is "very attractive" to the libertarian perspective and that it could "win a major battle in the arms race and gain years of new freedoms." territory".
Len is equally passionate about championing open knowledge and technological progress against interference from business and government.
The pursuit of knowledge is a fundamental part of being human. Any form of prior restrictions, I think, is an infringement on our freedom of thought and consciousness. So not only do I hope we can avoid overly restrictive, reactive legislation... I also don't want to see anyone create a framework that could be misused.
in the end
Just as Satoshi created Bitcoin behind a pseudonym, Len was to some extent forced to live behind his own mask. Following an incident in 2006, Len began suffering increasingly severe non-epileptic seizures and functional neurological problems, which exacerbated the depression he had struggled with since his teenage years.
A victim of stigma, Len "feels like he has to maintain this facade of superpowers" and is "very afraid" that his deteriorating health will end his work and disappoint the people he cares about.
Despite these challenges, Len continued to work until a few months before his death, writing papers and even giving a lecture at Dartmouth University. Sadly, he succeeded in hiding the severity of his situation from almost everyone.
"Very few people knew it had gotten to this point... Something I heard over and over again was, 'We never knew, it looked like he was OK.'"
Len's speech at Dartmouth shortly before his death
Just as Len built on the ideas of those who came before him, we sense his commitment to building things that transcend himself, which is one of the reasons for his dedication to open source and open knowledge.
"This is our legacy, these studies, these ideas, are leading us towards knowledge that has never been available in human history. We will pass this on to future generations. We have to make sure that we are not pushed into a situation where we cannot distribute the research Give others a blind spot and ensure these studies don’t get locked away in the vaults of intellectual property lawyers.
Len's death in 2011 was a huge loss to Cyberpunk and the tech community as a whole, as was evident from the outpouring of memories and condolences that followed. One in particular stood out to me: a post by user "pablos08" on Hacker News.
“Len and I became friends and were co-developers of cyberpunk, which at that time was a wild frontier. We were reimagining our world as a place filled with cryptographic systems that would use mathematics to defend what we hold dear. of freedom.
We imagine complex and obscure threats to problems we may one day face; we construct future protocols to defend against these threats. It's all a highly academic exercise in geeky utopia. And I usually keep it that way, but Len wanted to really get involved.
Cryptopunk writes programming code. "
(The above content is excerpted and reprinted with the authorization of our partner PANews, original text link | Source: Wu Shuo Blockchain)
Statement: The article only represents the author's personal views and opinions, and does not represent the objective views and positions of the blockchain. All contents and opinions are for reference only and do not constitute investment advice. Investors should make their own decisions and transactions, and the author and Blockchain Client will not be held responsible for any direct or indirect losses caused by investors' transactions.
"Biography of Len Sassaman: Who is most likely to be Satoshi Nakamoto?" This article was first published on (Block Guest).
