Len Sassaman is a familiar face in the field of cryptography. He was in the news recently due to the speculations that he is the real identity of the anonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
The legendary cryptographer and privacy advocate, Len Sassaman is in the news after 13 years of his death.
Sassaman has become the subject of public debate after the master filmmaker Cullen Hoback announced an upcoming documentary movie titled “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery.”
The documentary, produced by the American television network HBO, is expected to reveal the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto and many expect Len Sassaman to be the real face of the anonymous Bitcoin creator.
Len Sassaman: Early Life and Education
Len Sassaman was born on April 9, 1980, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, US. He completed his graduation from The Hill School in 1998. By the age of 18, Sassaman became a member of the Internet Engineering Task Force which was responsible for the TCP/IP protocol.
Later in his teens, Sassaman moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and became a regular face in the cypherpunk community as an internet privacy advocate. He was also enrolled as a PhD scholar at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.
He was a researcher with the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography (COSIC) research group, led by Bart Preneel.
Len Sassaman: Career
Len Sassaman started his career as the security architect and senior systems engineer for Anonymizer, Inc. an internet privacy company. In his varied career as a cryptographer and privacy advocate, he worked for Network Associates on the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption software and was a member of the Shmoo Group.
He also contributed to the OpenPGP IETF working group and the GNU Privacy Guard project. He was also a familiar face at technology conferences like DEF CON.
Sassaman co-founded the following ventures with different persons. Sassaman co-founded CodeCon along with Bram Cohen. He is also the co-founder of the HotPETS workshop with Roger Dingledine of Tor and Thomas Heydt-Benjamin.
He is also co-author of the Zimmermann–Sassaman key-signing protocol, which is a protocol in cryptography to speed up the public key fingerprint verification part of a key signing party, along with Werner Koch, Phil Zimmermann, and others.
Len Sassaman, along with his spouse Meredith L Patterson, worked on several research collaborations, including a critique of privacy flaws in the OLPC Bitfrost. security platform, and a proposed formal method of analysis of computer insecurity.
Len Sassaman: Death
Len Sassaman, a cryptography prodigy and renowned privacy advocate died on July 3, 2011. He is alleged to have committed suicide. He was diagnosed with depression during his teenage, which is thought to be the reason for his untimely demise.
To commemorate his contributions to cryptography and the early stage development of the Bitcoin blockchain, a tribute to Sassaman was encoded into Block 138725 of the Bitcoin blockchain.
Speculations about Len Sassaman being Satoshi Nakamoto
With the announcement of the HBO documentary “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery”, many people are speculating about the possibility of Len Sassaman being the real identity of the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. They have many reasons for believing that this hypothesis could be true.
The time of Satoshi Nakamoto’s final public conversation and Len Sassaman’s death are almost two months apart. Secondly, Len Sassaman left a 24-word suicide note, which many people speculate indicates the 24-word seed phrase of Bitcoin. Sassaman was also an expert remailer technologist, which is considered a precursor of Bitcoin.
However, Meredith L Patterson, Sassman’s wife does not believe this premise. She does not believe in this crisis and does not encourage the attempts adopted by the poly market enthusiasts to make Len Sassaman the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto.
Nevertheless, Sassaman’s contributions to the Bitcoin blockchain during the early phase of its development are indeed noteworthy.
The Bottom Line
Len Sassaman was a visionary and prodigious presence in the field of cryptography. If he were alive now, the whole cryptocurrency landscape would have grown to seamless dimensions.
Even if he is the real face of Satoshi Nakamoto or not, Sassaman’s contributions to cryptography and the development of the Bitcoin blockchain will always be remembered.
