According to Cointelegraph, deceased computer scientist and privacy advocate Len Sassaman has unexpectedly become a topic of interest as bettors speculate on an upcoming HBO documentary that claims to reveal the identity of Bitcoin's inventor.
Information about Leonard Harris Sassaman’s early life is limited. He attended a private school in Pennsylvania and was recognized as a cryptography prodigy. In his late teens, Sassaman moved to San Francisco, California, where he became involved with the cypherpunks, a group of computer privacy pioneers from the late 1980s. He later studied under blockchain inventor David Chaum.
Sassaman contributed to projects such as Pretty Good Privacy software and its update, GNU Privacy Guard. Alongside his wife, computer scientist Meredith Patterson, he founded the SaaS startup Osogato. At the time of his death, Sassaman was a doctoral student in electrical engineering at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. He died by suicide on July 3, 2011, at the age of 31. A memorial to him was encoded into Block 138725 of the Bitcoin blockchain.
Sassaman and Patterson married in 2006 and remained together until his death. Patterson has stated that she does not believe her husband was Satoshi Nakamoto. However, there is circumstantial evidence suggesting Sassaman could be Nakamoto. He left behind numerous publications, conference presentations, and other academic activities, indicating his capability of inventing Bitcoin. Sassaman was a member of the International Financial Cryptography Association and frequently spoke on financial cryptography.
Linguistic analysis also suggests that Sassaman could be Bitcoin’s inventor, as Nakamoto went silent two months before Sassaman’s death. Additionally, the $64 billion in Bitcoin held by Nakamoto remains untouched.
