On October 8, HBO is going to release a documentary (Money and Electronics: The Mystery of Bitcoin) directed by Karen Hoback. As soon as the trailer came out, American netizens went wild, saying that this film will unveil the mystery of the Bitcoin founder "Satoshi Nakamoto". Guess what? On Polymarket, people have bet more than $380,000 on who can guess the true face of "Satoshi Nakamoto".

Interestingly, 63.5% of netizens bet on a "small town youth" named Len Sassaman, thinking he is "Satoshi Nakamoto". Harold Finney, an American software engineer who had been considered a popular candidate, only received 12.4% support. Even Open AI, Google and Microsoft's AI tools predicted that Finney would be "Satoshi Nakamoto". It seems that netizens' ideas are different from those of AI this time.

Speaking of Len Sassaman, his life is like a legendary novel. In 2011, at the age of 31, he committed suicide due to depression and functional neurological disorder. Although he came from a small town in Pennsylvania, he was a heavyweight in the early days of the Internet.

Did you know? At the age of 18, Sassaman joined the Internet Engineering Task Force and was responsible for building the TCP/IP protocol, which is the foundation of the Internet! Later, he moved to the Bay Area and became roommates with Cohen, the founder of BitTorrent. In 2004, with only a high school education, he was admitted as a doctoral student in the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography Research Group of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, and worked there as a researcher until his death. His mentor was David Chaum, the "father of digital currency"!

Over the years, the American media has been digging into whether Sasaman is "Satoshi Nakamoto". Judging from his daily habits and vocabulary, "Satoshi Nakamoto" is likely to be in Europe, and Sasaman happens to be in Belgium. There is another detail. "Satoshi Nakamoto" once posted that "the difficulty of mining increased yesterday". If he was in the United States, that time would not be considered "yesterday". Besides, the main research circle of encryption technology was in the United States at that time. "Satoshi Nakamoto" was most likely an American or had close ties with the American academic circle. At that time, there were not many people who met these conditions and lived in Europe.

What’s even more amazing is that the frequency of “Satoshi Nakamoto’s” posts would surge during the winter and summer vacations, and almost disappear at the end of the spring and autumn semesters. On weekdays, “Satoshi Nakamoto” is often active in the evening or late at night during the European time period, a typical “night owl”.

The most coincidental thing is that two months before Sassaman committed suicide, "Satoshi Nakamoto" suddenly posted: "I have turned to other things and may not appear here in the future." Don't you think this is too coincidental?

However, the HBO trailer also reminds us that no one can be 100% sure who "Satoshi Nakamoto" is. "If a person is smart enough to create the rules of Bitcoin, then he must be smart enough to hide everything about himself."