作者：Evan Hatch Founder @worlds.org
Compiled by: Liam
On October 3, according to foreign media reports, documentary director Cullen Hoback and HBO recently announced that the documentary (Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery) will expose the true identity of "Satoshi Nakamoto", the creator behind Bitcoin. This statement has attracted special attention and discussion in the industry. Some people even said, "Cullen Hoback's discovery will shock the world and even the US election."
Cullen Hoback said on social media X yesterday, "Some of you may be wondering why I disappeared. Well, I'm investigating another missing person. Curious about who is behind Bitcoin? (Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery) will be revealed next Tuesday. It will be a roller coaster ride."
Cullen Hoback also said, "Given the expected performance of the design market, I won't reveal too many details. It's only a few days away from the release."
Bettors are mixed on confidence that Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity will eventually be revealed, according to data from Polymarket, where traders assess that HBO’s latest documentary could tie Len Sassaman to the creation of Bitcoin.
Currently in Polymarket, bettors are favoring Len Sassaman over Hal Finney as the potential Satoshi. Sassaman currently leads with 49% odds, while Finney is at 14%. Hoback said, "I will not be betting, but I can confirm that we will settle on a specific name."
Cryptographer Len Sassaman is known for developing privacy tools such as PGP and Mixmaster. His commitment to privacy and decentralization is highly consistent with the core principles of Bitcoin.
Sassaman died in 2011 shortly after Nakamoto went missing, sparking speculation that the two might be the same person. Nakamoto has not been online since December 13, 2010.
At the same time, people speculated that Hal Finney might be Satoshi Nakamoto, because Finney was the first person to download and run the Bitcoin software after Satoshi Nakamoto. In January 2009, Finney also received the first Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto, which established a direct connection between them.
Finney's early involvement in Bitcoin and its community has fueled speculation that he is the creator of Bitcoin. One theory is that Finney concealed his identity to protect his privacy and avoid government scrutiny.
In addition to Sassaman and Finney, other possible candidates for Satoshi Nakamoto exposed by HBO include famous computer scientist and cryptographer Nicholas Szabo and Blockstream CEO Adam Back.
Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, according to a British court ruling, but somehow he appeared on the list. His probability is currently 2%. Elon Musk also participated in the vote, with a probability of less than 1%.
The following article (History of Cypherpunks: Len Sassaman and Satoshi) is a nearly 9,000-word article published in 2021 that speculates that Len Sassamanda is Satoshi Nakamoto, a scholar living in Belgium, Europe.
Both the daily routine and the content of the posts are consistent with the time when Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin.
I hope this article will be helpful to readers. It is for reference only. The following is the full text of the article.
We have lost too many hackers to suicide. What if Satoshi was one of them?
An obituary has been embedded in every node on the Bitcoin network. It’s a hacked transaction in memory of Len Sassaman, who has essentially been immortalized in the blockchain. In many ways, it’s a fitting tribute.
Len is a true cypherpunk - brilliant, uninhibited, and idealistic. He has dedicated his life to defending individual freedom through cryptography, working as a developer of PGP encryption and open source privacy technology, and as an academic cryptographer studying P2P networks under the guidance of blockchain inventor David Chaum.
He is also a pillar of the hacker community: a friend and influencer to many important figures in information security and cryptocurrency history.
Losing Satoshi
Lane was said to be on track to become one of the foremost cryptographers of his time, but tragically committed suicide on July 3, 2011, at the age of 31, after a long battle with depression and functional neurological disorders.
His death coincided with the disappearance of the world’s most famous cypherpunk: Satoshi Nakamoto. Just 2 months before Len’s death, Satoshi sent their last communication:
I have moved on to other things and will probably not be here again in the future.
Over the course of a year, Satoshi submitted 169 code commits and 539 posts before disappearing without explanation, leaving behind a mountain of unfinished features, heated debates about their vision for Bitcoin, and a $64 billion BTC fortune that remains untapped to this day.
We’ve lost too many hackers to suicide. Aaron Swartz, Gene Kan, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, James Dolan. They’ve all been victims of stigma and an epidemic that’s costing technological progress itself. Imagine if the creators of Bitcoin had died before they achieved their goal. If that were true, if they’d been treated with the care and dignity they deserved, what would they have given to the world?
I hesitate to speculate on the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, as discussions about him are often misleading, or even downright stupid and immoral. However, with Craig Wright’s fraudulent claim to have created Bitcoin, it is worth revisiting the topic and revisiting the cypherpunks who actually created Bitcoin.
Whoever Satoshi Nakamoto was, they “stood on the shoulders of giants” — Bitcoin is the culmination of decades of accumulated research and discussion in the cypherpunk community. In this sense, Len is undoubtedly an indirect contributor. However, one cannot help but wonder who actually wrote the code, ran the first node, and posted under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.
In order to synthesize and implement the myriad ideas that Bitcoin is based on, that person or group would need a unique combination of expertise, spanning public key infrastructure, academic cryptography, P2P network design, practical security architectures, and privacy techniques. They would likely be deeply rooted in the cypherpunk community and close to those who have had a major impact on cryptocurrency. Finally, they would need a strong conviction and hacker spirit to “roll up their sleeves” and anonymously build a real-world version of ideas that had previously been relegated to the theoretical realm.
When I think about Len’s life, I see many of the same traits, and I think it’s very likely that Len was a direct contributor to Bitcoin.
With the unprecedented attention being paid to cryptocurrencies, I hope to shine a spotlight on an unsung hero to whom we owe a debt of gratitude. I also hope we can reflect on the importance of addressing mental illness, especially functional neurological disorders, which deserve more attention.
origin
Even at a young age, Len was a self-taught technologist with a penchant for cryptography and protocol development. Although he lived in a small town in Pennsylvania, at the age of 18, Len joined the Internet Engineering Task Force, working on the TCP/IP protocol underlying the Internet, and later on the Bitcoin network.
"Always a little weird because I was smart," Len was diagnosed with depression as a teenager. Unfortunately, he suffered trauma at the hands of a "borderline sadistic" psychiatrist, an experience that can make people distrust so-called authority figures.
In 1999, Len moved to the Bay Area and quickly became a fixture in the Cypherpunk community. He roomed with Bram Cohen, the founder of Mojo and Bittorrent, and became a contributor to the legendary Cypherpunk mailing list, where Satoshi Nakamoto first announced Bitcoin. Other hackers remember him as smart and relaxed, chasing squirrels at Cypherpunk conferences and speeding in a sports car with a "get out of jail free" card on it in case he was stopped by the police.
In San Francisco, Len works to defend individual freedom and privacy through technology and political direct action. At 21, he made headlines for organizing protests against government surveillance and the jailing of hacker Dmitriy Skelarov.
Strong encryption
Early in his career, Len established himself as an authority on public key cryptography, the foundation of Bitcoin. By the age of 22, he was speaking at conferences and had founded a public key crypto startup with renowned open source activist Bruce Perens.
After the dot-com crash, the startup folded and Len joined Network Associates to help develop the PGP cryptography at the heart of Bitcoin. During the 2001 release of PGP7, Len set up interoperability testing for the OpenPGP implementation, which brought him into contact with many important cryptographic pioneers. Len also contributed to the GNU Privacy Guard implementation of OpenPGP and worked with PGP inventor Phil Zimmerman to invent a new cryptographic protocol.
In introducing Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto said he wanted Bitcoin to be "a thing that is used for currency" in the same way that strong encryption (i.e. PGP) is used to protect files.
A generation ago, multi-user time-sharing computer systems had a similar problem. Before the advent of strong encryption, users had to rely on password protection…
Then, strong encryption became available to the public, and trust was no longer necessary. … Now it’s time we do the same with money.
Hal Finney
At Network Associates, Len worked with Hal Finney on PGP. Finney was the second PGP developer and helped create the RFC 4880 standard for OpenPGP interoperability. He was also the earliest and most important contributor to Bitcoin after Satoshi Nakamoto:
Finney was the first person other than Satoshi Nakamoto to contribute to the Bitcoin code and run a Bitcoin node.
Finney was the first recipient of Bitcoin (sent by Satoshi Nakamoto himself).
Finney invented the concept of reusable proof of work, upon which Bitcoin mining is based.
Satoshi communicated extensively with Finney long before Bitcoin was released, and in one of their final blog posts, Satoshi publicly paid tribute to Finney.
Not surprisingly, Finney is one of the most popular candidates for Satoshi Nakamoto, even though this meant that Finney faked a lot of his email interactions with Satoshi and contributed to Bitcoin under both his real name and another fake identity. Finney would continue to work on Bitcoin after Satoshi “left” in 2011.
Mail forwarding program
Len and Finney have a very rare and relevant skill set: they were both developers of the mail forwarder technology that was a precursor to Bitcoin.
Invented by David Chaum along with cryptocurrency, a mail forwarder is a specialized server used to send messages anonymously or pseudonymously. Their use was common when contributing to the Cypherpunk mailing list, which itself was built on top of distributed mail forwarders.
Diagram of a Type II mail forwarder
Early mail forwarders simply forwarded messages while hiding the identity of the sender, while later protocols (such as Mixmaster, the most popular mail forwarder) rely on decentralized nodes to distribute fixed-size encrypted blocks of information on a P2P network. Bitcoin's architecture is very similar to mail forwarders, although its nodes transmit transaction data instead of messages. In 1997, crypto-anarchist founder Tim May even proposed a digital currency based on mail forwarders.
As the lead developer, node operator, and lead maintainer of Mixmaster, Len is a prominent expert in mail forwarding techniques. He has also implemented similar techniques as a systems engineer and security architect at Anonymizer Privacy Guard.
Email forwarders are not only the direct technological forerunner of Bitcoin, but also the foundation of Bitcoin's intellectual history. In (Why We Need Email Forwarders), Finney argues that email forwarders are the foundation of an anonymous digital economy.
Mail forwarders represent the underlying idea of this concept, the ability to exchange information privately without revealing our true identity. This way we can transact, show our credentials, and make deals without government or corporate databases tracking our every move.
One of the cypherpunks’ visions included the ability to conduct transactions anonymously using “digital cash”… This is another area where anonymous email plays an important role.
Mail forwarding operators were the first to recognize the need for cryptocurrencies: without an anonymous means of payment, mail forwarding had to be run out of the operator's own pocket. This created scalability issues, and meant that spam and abuse were a constant problem. Because of this, the underlying concepts of many cryptocurrencies stem from the need for an abuse-resistant, for-profit mail forwarding service:
In 1994, Finney proposed that mail forwarders could be monetized through anonymous "coins" and "cash tokens."
Smart contracts were first discussed in the context of preventing abuse by mail forwarders. Nick Szabo published a prescient paper on smart contracts in 1997, specifically mentioning Mixmaster.
Ian Goldberg and Ryan Lackey (both of whom Len knew) were key figures in the email forwarding community, and they were involved in developing an unfinished cryptocurrency called HINDE in 1998. Ian later created several early ecash clients, while Ryan became the CSO of Tezos.
Thus, Satoshi’s second article on Bitcoin states that sending emails for a fee is the first working use case for Bitcoin.
Initially it could be used for proof-of-work applications that are almost, but not quite, free services.
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
One person Len has crossed paths with in the small email forwarding community is Blockstream CEO Adam Back, who was the first person to communicate with Satoshi Nakamoto.
Back's interest in cryptocurrency began when he was running a mail forwarder, and he created the HashCash proof-of-work system for mail forwarder operators to combat spam and DDOS attacks. Satoshi later used HashCash as the basis for Bitcoin mining.
We know that Len worked directly with Back, listing him as a contributor to research papers and Mixmaster memos. Both were involved in many OpenPGP implementations and were connected in each other's PGP trust network.
Interestingly, Back himself has suggested that Satoshi may have been a mail forwarder developer, noting that developers would "practice their own techniques" to participate anonymously in cryptographic protocol discussions. Unlike many of the Cypherpunks discussed, we know that Len made a lot of anonymous contributions to the Cypherpunk mailing list through a mail forwarder.
Bram Cohen responded to this article, suggesting that he and Hal Finney may have worked together under pseudonyms
Chaum and COSIC
After graduating from high school, Len worked to support his family and never had the opportunity to go to college. Despite this, in 2004, he got his "dream job" as a researcher and doctoral student at COSIC, a computer security and industrial cryptography research group at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.
Len’s doctoral advisor at COSIC was none other than David Chaum, the “Father of Digital Currency.” Although Chaum laid the foundation for the entire cypherpunk movement and all cryptocurrencies, few people can say that they have worked directly with him.
Some of Chaum's related achievements:
He invented cryptocurrency in his 1983 paper "Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments."
The invention of blockchain, his 1982 paper detailed the code for all but one element of the blockchain, which is detailed in the Bitcoin white paper.
His company Digicash created the first electronic cash system. Anonymous payments between digital pseudonyms were central to this vision.
“[Chaum] is at the center of a seemingly unstoppable movement — the digitization of money… The wild card in the age of digital money is anonymity, and David Chaum argues that without it, we’re in trouble.”
While Digicash failed (in part due to its reliance on a centralized system), Chaum wanted to create a second digital currency that would offer a combination of anonymity and utility.
While many viewed its failure as proof that digital cash was unworkable, Satoshi defended the “old Chaumian currency” while acknowledging the problems posed by centralization.
Many people automatically assume that electronic money is doomed to fail because so many companies have failed since the 1990s. I hope people understand that it is the centralized controlled nature of these systems that dooms them to failure.
Len's Research
Len worked for COSIC in Belgium until his death in 2011. During this time he produced 45 publications and held 20 conference committee positions.
Len's research focuses on developing privacy-enhancing protocols with "real-world applicability" and working code. His main project (assisted by Bram Cohen) is Pynchon Gate, an evolution of mail forwarder technology that allows anonymous information retrieval through a distributed network of nodes without the need for a trusted third party.
Pynchon Gate and meta index + bucket pool architecture
This work is closely related to Bitcoin - as work on Pynchon Gate progressed, Len became increasingly focused on finding solutions to Byzantine failures (aka the Byzantine Generals Problem), which had been a major obstacle to early P2P networks.
Byzantine Fault
In the context of distributed computing, Byzantine fault tolerance refers to the ability of a network to remain functional when nodes are compromised or unreliable. Byzantine fault tolerance is one of the biggest problems that needs to be solved for a secure, decentralized cryptocurrency without the need for double spending or trusted third parties. Satoshi Nakamoto's most important innovation was the "triple entry" accounting system, which solved this problem using the blockchain introduced by Chaum.
Len became increasingly active in the field of financial cryptography during the development of Bitcoin between 2008 and 2010. He joined the International Financial Cryptography Association and gave presentations at and served on the committee of the Financial Cryptography and Data Conference. The latter was founded by Robert Hettinga, an early and prominent advocate of digital cash, which was a major topic at the conference.
Satoshi Nakamoto as a scholar
There are numerous clues that Satoshi Nakamoto worked in academia during the development of Bitcoin, an idea that has been echoed by Gavin Andersen, founder of the Bitcoin Foundation.
“I think he’s an academic, maybe a postdoc, maybe a professor, who just doesn’t want to draw attention to himself.”
Satoshi's code contributions and comments increased dramatically during the summer and winter breaks, but tapered off in late spring and year-end, when scholars were taking final exams or grading.
The unique structure of Bitcoin's code also suggests that Nakamoto had an academic background. Bitcoin has been described as "brilliant but careless," eschewing traditional software development practices such as unit testing, but exhibiting a cutting-edge security architecture and an expert understanding of academic cryptography and economics.
Whoever did this has a deep understanding of cryptography... they've read the academic papers, they have a sharp intellect, and they've brought these concepts together in a really new way.
When renowned security researcher Dan Kaminsky first reviewed Satoshi’s code, he attempted to penetration test it with 9 different vulnerabilities but was surprised to find that Satoshi had anticipated and patched them all.
“I thought of some beautiful bugs, but every time I looked at the code I found a line of code that would solve the problem… I’ve never seen anything like it.”
This may indicate that Satoshi and Kaminsky had common information security experience and expertise. Coincidentally, Len and Kaminsky co-authored and published a paper demonstrating methods for attacking public key infrastructure.
In addition, the Bitcoin whitepaper was published in a format rarely seen on the Cypherpunk mailing list—a LaTeX-formatted research paper with academic content such as an abstract, conclusion, and MLA citations. In contrast, other proposals such as Bitgold and b-money were unstructured blog posts.
Satoshi Nakamoto in Europe
Since COSIC is headquartered in Leuven, Len was living in Belgium during the development of Bitcoin. This is important because many facts indicate that Satoshi Nakamoto lived in Europe - a major focus of the early investigations.
Satoshi's writing style reflects British English spelling and word choices, such as bloody hard, flat, maths, grey, and the dd/mm/yyyy date format. However, Satoshi also mentioned the euro instead of the pound.
Bitcoin’s genesis block also contains the headline from that day’s edition (“Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”). The headline is unique to the print edition, which is only distributed in the UK and Europe. In 2009, the Times was one of the top ten newspapers in Belgium and was “widely used by academics and researchers because of its wide circulation in libraries and its detailed indexing”.
These clues leave us with a paradox: they suggest that Satoshi Nakamoto was European, but the people who possessed the necessary skills and understood the main implications of Bitcoin were most likely Americans. Much of the cypherpunk community coalesced around conferences and meetups, which is one reason why people from the United States, especially San Francisco, are overrepresented. Similarly, jobs that offer access to cutting-edge professional information security and cryptography experience are concentrated in the United States.
Oddly enough, even though Len is American, he uses the exact same British English as Satoshi.
Analyzing Satoshi’s posting history, it can be found that he is a European “night owl” who works on Bitcoin after get off work or school during the day. Satoshi also said that the increase in mining difficulty occurred “yesterday”, but if he lived in the United States, the situation would be different.
Assuming Satoshi lived a life unrelated to Bitcoin, he was not working at his computer at home most of the time during work or school… If Satoshi lived in the BST time zone, he worked most of the time at night, often until the early morning hours
When we examined Len’s tweet history, we found that the timestamps of Satoshi’s posts and code commits matched closely with Len’s own late-night activity.
P2P Network
While Bitcoin was not the first cryptocurrency, it was the first cryptocurrency to be based on a fully P2P distributed network. Satoshi Nakamoto stressed the importance of this when he first mentioned Bitcoin:
I have been working on a new electronic cash system that is completely peer-to-peer and does not require a trusted third party.
Dan Kaminsky said that in order to create Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto needed to "understand economics, cryptography, and P2P networks," and Len had an unusually early and in-depth understanding of these three disciplines and their applications to digital currencies.
Bram and Len interviewed at CodeCon
While in San Francisco, Len lived and worked with Bram Cohen, the creator of the most widely used P2P protocol, BitTorrent. During this time (2000-2002), Bram developed a revolutionary P2P network called MojoNation, which used the "Mojo Token" digital currency, making it one of the first publicly issued digital currencies.
In MojoNation’s P2P economy, “tokens” can be exchanged for file storage, which will be encrypted and encoded into “blocks” uploaded to a distributed network of nodes hosting a public ledger, reminiscent of Bitcoin’s own distributed bilateral accounting system. Mojo is not just an internal accounting token, but a full currency — it can be exchanged for US dollars and vice versa. Some of the early discussions about token economics involved the mechanics of the Mojo token.
A Mojo unit represents a portion of the current functionality of the entire system. If you work for me now, I will give you tokens, and in the future when the network is larger, these tokens will represent a portion of a larger pie, so when you spend them, their value will increase.
Satoshi Nakamoto discussed token economics in a very similar way:
It has the potential to form a positive feedback loop; as users increase, the value rises, which can attract more users to take advantage of the growing value.
Although visionary, MojoNation’s economic model soon collapsed due to hyperinflation. Satoshi Nakamoto consciously designed Bitcoin to avoid this fate by having deflation built in and not relying on a central “coin minting” server.
In 2001, Bram launched BitTorrent. As a P2P alternative to the centralized Napster, BitTorrent foreshadowed Bitcoin's own distributed node topology and consensus system, as well as the protocol-level incentive system. BitTorrent not only innovated on networks such as Gnutella at the technical level, but also utilized economic incentives and game theory.
Bittorent's design compared to Napster
Len presciently told Bram that “BitTorrent will make him greater than [Napster founder] Sean Fanning.” Satoshi later referenced Napster when explaining the need for a fully decentralized web.
Governments are good at cutting off the leadership of centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be able to hold their own.
Coincidentally, Len and Tor founder Roger Dingledine both participated in the development of the Mixminion mail forwarding protocol, spoke together at the Black Hat conference, and co-founded the HotPETS conference.
In 2002, Len and Bram co-founded the CodeCon conference, which focuses on "highly practical projects with useful code." At CodeCon in 2005, Finney introduced reusable proof-of-work via a modified BitTorrent client that sent P2P digital currency. One commentator described it as:
... The world's first transparent server that facilitates a distributed, collaborative world of RPOW servers.
Cryptocurrencies were a hot topic at the inaugural CodeCon, which included a HashCash demo by Adam Back and Zooko’s introduction of Mnet, the fully open-source and decentralized successor to MojoNation. Mojo is not affiliated with any one company and can be independently audited, both of which Satoshi considered critical.
Mnet client screenshots
MojoNation co-founders Zooko Wilcox and Jim McCoy also became an inspiration to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency pioneers. Zooko was one of Satoshi Nakamoto’s first collaborators and an employee of David Chaum at Digicash, and Satoshi included a link to Zooko’s blog when Bitcoin v0.1 was released on Bitcoin.org. Zooko later founded Zcash, a major privacy-focused cryptocurrency. He created the often-discussed “Zooko’s Triangle” framework.
“Zooko’s Triangle is a trilemma of three properties that the names of network protocol participants are often considered to have”
McCoy is also a major influencer in the cryptocurrency space, and Ryan Selkis of Digital Currency Group has said he believes McCoy could be Satoshi Nakamoto.
Hacktivism
Even by the standards of the cypherpunk community, both Len and Satoshi had particularly strong ideological beliefs and commitments to open knowledge.
I wish you would stop talking about me... maybe talk about open source projects and give more credit to your developers
Satoshi’s “hacktivist” approach to distributing Bitcoin through free, open-source grassroots projects stood in stark contrast to their predecessors. Chaum, Stefan Brand, eCash, and others took a radically different approach: filing patents, forming closed-source venture capital firms, and trying to drive adoption through corporate partnerships.
This is similar to Len's extensive contributions to open source projects such as PGP, Mixmaster, GNU Privacy Guard, and his extensive volunteer experience in groups such as the Shmoo Group.
In response to this story, Bram said Len preferred to post anonymously
Satoshi Nakamoto has hinted at their ideological leanings several times, saying that Bitcoin is "very attractive to libertarian views" and could "win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new free territory within a few years."
Len is equally passionate about defending open knowledge and technological progress from interference from corporations and governments.
The pursuit of knowledge is a fundamental part of being human. Any kind of prior restriction is, in my opinion, an infringement on our freedom of thought and consciousness. Therefore, I not only hope that we can avoid overly restrictive knee-jerk legislation... I don't want to see anyone establish a framework that could be misused for this purpose.
ending
Just as Satoshi created Bitcoin under a pseudonym, Len was in a sense forced to live under his role. After an accident in 2006, Len’s non-epileptic seizures and functional neurological issues became increasingly severe, exacerbating the depression he had been battling since his youth.
As a victim of stigma, Len “felt like he had to continue to maintain this facade of being this super-capable guy” and was “terrified” that his declining health would end his work and disappoint the people he cared about.
Despite these challenges, Len continued to work until a few months before his death, contributing to papers and even giving a lecture at Dartmouth. Tragically, he successfully concealed the severity of his situation from almost everyone in his life.
Few knew the extent of the situation... One thing I heard repeatedly was "We never knew, it looked like he was doing fine."
Len spoke at Dartmouth shortly before his death
As Len built on the ideas that came before him, one gets the sense that he was committed to building something that would outlast him, which is one reason for his commitment to open source and open knowledge.
This is our legacy, our research and ideas, which will lead to knowledge that humans have never had the opportunity to obtain in history, and we will pass this knowledge on to future generations. We need to make sure that we don't get stuck in a situation where we can't share our research with others, and that it doesn't get locked away in the vaults of intellectual property lawyers.
Len’s death in 2011 was a huge loss for the cypherpunks and the tech community in general, a fact reflected in the outpouring of memories and sympathies that followed. One comment stood out to me: an article by “pablos08” on Hacker News.
Len and I became friends, and we were both cypherpunk conspirators back in the wild, wild days. We reimagined our world, a world filled with cryptographic systems that would mathematically enforce the freedoms we cherished. Anonymous mail forwarders would protect speech from retaliation; Onion Routers would ensure that no one could censor the internet; digital cash would enable a completely free economy. We had a plan to decentralize and distribute everything.
We imagine complex and esoteric threats to future problems — and we design future protocols to protect against them. All of this is a geeky utopian academic exercise. I tend to keep it that way, but Len wants to get his hands dirty. Cypherpunks write code.
