https://evanlhatch.medium.com/len-sassaman-and-satoshi-e483c85c2b10
We’ve lost too many hackers to suicide. What if Satoshi was one of them?
Embedded on every single node of the Bitcoin network is an obituary. Hacked into the transaction data, it’s a memorial to Len Sassaman, a man essentially immortalized in the blockchain itself. A fitting tribute in more ways than one.
Len was a true Cypherpunk— equal parts brilliant, irreverent, and idealistic. He devoted his life to defending personal freedoms through cryptography, working as a developer on PGP encryption and open-source privacy technology, as well as an academic cryptographer researching P2P networks under blockchain inventor David Chaum.
He was also a pillar of the hacker community: a friend and influence to so many of the important figures in the history of infosec and cryptocurrency.
By all accounts, Len was on track to be one of the most important cryptographers of his time. But on July 3rd, 2011, he tragically took his own life at 31, following a long battle with depression and functional neurological disorders.
His death coincided with the disappearance of the world’s most famous cypherpunk: Satoshi Nakamoto. Only 2 months before Len died, Satoshi sent their final communication:
I’ve moved on to other things and probably won’t be around in the future.
After 169 code commits and 539 posts in the span of a year, Satoshi disappeared without explanation. They left behind a slew of uncompleted features, raging debates about their vision for Bitcoin, and a still-untouched fortune of $64B in BTC.
We’ve lost too many hackers to suicide. Aaron Swartz. Gene Kan. Ilya Zhitomirskiy. James Dolan. All of them victims of stigma and an epidemic that has exacted a price on technological progress itself. Imagine if the creator of Bitcoin died well before they could see it through. And if that were true, what would they have given the world had they been treated with the concern and dignity they deserved?
I hesitate to speculate about Satoshi’s identity, given that the discourse has generally ranged from misguided to downright idiotic and unethical. But with Craig Wright fraudulently claiming credit and invoking a copyright claim to take down the Bitcoin whitepaper, it’s important we revisit the topic and recenter the discussion around the Cypherpunks who actually built Bitcoin.
Whoever Satoshi was, they were very much ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ — Bitcoin was the culmination of decades of accumulated research and discourse within the Cypherpunk community. In this sense, Len was unequivocally an indirect contributor. Yet one has to wonder who actually wrote the code, ran the first node, and posted using the Satoshi pseudonym.
To synthesize and implement the myriad ideas Bitcoin was based on, that person or group of people would have required a unique combination of expertise spanning public key infrastructure, academic cryptography, P2P network design, practical security architecture, and privacy technology. They would likely have been deeply engrained in the Cypherpunk community and adjacent to the figures who proved to be major influences on cryptocurrency. Finally, they would have needed the ideological conviction and hacker ethos to ‘roll up their sleeves’ and anonymously build a real-world version of ideas that had previously been relegated to the realm of theory.
When I consider Len’s life, I see many of these same traits and I think there is a real possibility that Len was a direct contributor to Bitcoin.
In light of the unprecedented attention that cryptocurrency is receiving, I’m hopeful I can bring attention to one of the ‘unsung heroes’ to whom we owe credit. I also hope that we can reflect on the immense importance of addressing mental illness and especially functional neurological disorders that deserve far more attention.
