Original title: Len Sassaman and Satoshi: a Cypherpunk History
Original author: Evan Hatch, Founder @ worlds.org Original translation: 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 aroused special attention and discussion in the industry. Some even said, "Cullen Hoback's discovery will shock the world and even the US election." Cullen Hoback said yesterday on social media X, "Some of you may wonder why I disappeared. Well, I'm investigating another missing person. Curious about who is behind Bitcoin? "Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery" will be revealed on Tuesday. It will be a roller coaster ride." Cullen Hoback also said, "Given the expected performance of the design market, too many details will not be spoiled. It's only a few days away from the release." According to data on Polymarket, when the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto was finally revealed, bettors had mixed confidence. Polymarket traders assessed that HBO's latest documentary may link Len Sassaman to the creation of Bitcoin. Currently in Polymarket, bettors are more optimistic about Len Sassaman than Hal Finney as a potential Satoshi Nakamoto. Sassaman currently leads with 49% odds, while Finney is at 14%. "I'm not going to bet on that, but I can confirm that we're going to settle on a specific name," Hoback said.
Cryptologist Len Sassaman is best known for developing privacy tools like PGP and Mixmaster. His commitment to privacy and decentralization aligns well with the core principles of Bitcoin.
Sassaman died in 2011 shortly after Satoshi Nakamoto went missing, sparking speculation that the two might be the same person. Satoshi Nakamoto hasn't been online since December 13, 2010.
Meanwhile, people speculate that Hal Finney could be Satoshi Nakamoto, as Finney was the first person to download and run the Bitcoin software after Satoshi Nakamoto. Finney also received Satoshi Nakamoto's first Bitcoin transaction in January 2009, which established a direct connection between them.
Finney's early involvement in Bitcoin and its community has sparked speculation that he is the creator of Bitcoin. There is a theory 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 Nicholas Szabo, a famous computer scientist and cryptographer, and Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream.
Craig Wright was previously ruled by a British court to be not Satoshi Nakamoto, 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, "The History of Cypherpunks: Len Sassaman and Satoshi", is a nearly 9,000-word article published in 2021 about the speculation that Len Sassamanda is Satoshi Nakamoto, a scholar living in Belgium, Europe. Both his daily routine and the content of his posts are consistent with the time when Satoshi Nakamoto founded Bitcoin.
I hope this article will be inspiring to readers. For reference only. The following is the full text of the article.
We have lost too many hackers who committed suicide. What if Satoshi Nakamoto was one of them?
There is an obituary embedded in every node on the Bitcoin network. This is a hacked transaction data to commemorate Len Sassaman, who has essentially been immortalized in the blockchain. In many ways, this is 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 of many important figures in the history of information security and cryptocurrency.
1. Losing Satoshi
Len was said to be on track to become one of the most important cryptographers of his time. But after a long battle with depression and functional neurological disorders, he unfortunately committed suicide on July 3, 2011, at the age of 31.
His death coincided with the disappearance of the world's most famous cypherpunk: Satoshi. Just 2 months before Len's death, Satoshi sent their last communication:
"I have moved on to other things and may not be here again in the future."
Over the course of a year, Satoshi submitted 169 code, published 539 posts, and then disappeared without explanation. They left behind a large number of unfinished features, heated debates about their vision for Bitcoin, and a $64 billion BTC fortune that remains untapped to this day.
We have lost too many hackers to suicide. Aaron Swartz, Gene Kan, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, James Dolan. They are all victims of stigma and an epidemic that costs technological progress itself. Imagine if the creators of Bitcoin died before they achieved their goal. If this is true, if they were treated with the care and dignity they deserve, what would they have given to the world?
I am reluctant to speculate on the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, as discussions about him are usually misleading, even downright stupid and immoral. However, with Craig Wright fraudulently claiming to have created Bitcoin, it is necessary to revisit this topic and revisit the cypherpunks who really created Bitcoin.
Whoever Satoshi Nakamoto was, they were “standing on the shoulders of giants” — Bitcoin is the culmination of decades of accumulated research and discussion in the cypherpunk community. In this sense, Len was undoubtedly an indirect contributor. However, one cannot help but wonder who actually wrote the code, ran the first node, and posted under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto.
In order to synthesize and implement the myriad ideas that Bitcoin is based on, that person or group of people would need to have a unique combination of expertise, spanning public key infrastructure, academic cryptography, P2P network design, practical security architectures, and privacy technologies. They would likely have deep roots in the cypherpunk community and close relationships with figures who have had a significant impact on cryptocurrency. Finally, they would need a strong belief 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 level.
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.
Given the unprecedented attention that cryptocurrency has received, I hope to shine a spotlight on an “unsung hero” to whom we owe a debt of gratitude. I also hope that we can reflect on the significance of addressing mental illness, especially functional neurological disorders, which deserve more attention.
Second, Origins
Even at a young age, Len was a self-taught technologist with a special interest in 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, where he worked on the TCP/IP protocol underlying the Internet, and later on the Bitcoin network.
“Because he was smart, he was always a little weird,” 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 lighthearted, 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 dedicated himself to defending 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.
Three, strong encryption technology
Early in his career, Len became known as an authority in public key cryptography (the basis of Bitcoin). By the age of 22, he was speaking at conferences and co-founded a public key cryptography startup with Bruce Perens, a well-known open source activist.
After the dot-com bubble burst, the startup collapsed and Len joined Network Associates to help develop the PGP encryption technology at the heart of Bitcoin. During the release of PGP7 in 2001, Len set up interoperability testing for the OpenPGP implementation, which brought him into contact with many important encryption pioneers. Len also contributed to the GNU Privacy Guard implementation of OpenPGP and worked with PGP inventor Phil Zimmerman to invent a new encryption protocol.
In introducing Bitcoin, Satoshi said he wanted Bitcoin to be "a thing for money" in the same way that strong cryptography (i.e., PGP) is for protecting files.
A generation ago, multi-user time-sharing computer systems had a similar problem. Before strong cryptography, users had to rely on passwords for protection... Then strong cryptography became available to the public, and trust was no longer necessary. ... Now it's time to do the same with money.
Fourth, 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:
· Finney was the first person other than Satoshi to contribute to the Bitcoin code and run a Bitcoin node.
· Finney was the first recipient of Bitcoin (sent by Satoshi himself).
· Finney invented the concept of reusable proof of work, on which Bitcoin mining is based.
· Satoshi communicated extensively with Finney long before Bitcoin was released. In one of their last blog posts, Satoshi publicly expressed his respect for Finney.
Unsurprisingly, Finney is one of the most popular candidates for Satoshi, even though this means 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.
V. Mail Forwarders
Len and Finney had a very rare and relevant skill: they were both developers of the mail forwarder technology that was a precursor to Bitcoin.
Introduced by David Chaum along with cryptocurrency, a mail forwarder is a dedicated server used to send messages anonymously or pseudonymously. Their use was very common when contributing to the Cypherpunk mailing list, which itself was built on distributed mail forwarders.
Schematic diagram of a type II mail forwarder
While early mail forwarders simply forwarded messages while hiding the identity of the sender, later protocols (such as Mixmaster, the most popular mail forwarder) rely on decentralized nodes to distribute fixed-size encrypted blocks of information across 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 technology. He has also implemented similar technology as a systems engineer and security architect at Anonymizer Privacy Guard.
Mail forwarders are not only the direct technological forerunner of Bitcoin, but also the foundation of Bitcoin's intellectual history. In the article "Why We Need Mail Forwarders", Finney argues that mail forwarders are the foundation of an anonymous digital economy.
Mail forwarders represented the “underlying idea” of this concept, the ability to exchange information privately without revealing one’s true identity. In this way, we could 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 transact anonymously using “digital cash”… This is another area where anonymous email plays an important role.
Mail forwarder operators were the first to recognize the need for cryptocurrencies: without an anonymous means of payment, mail forwarders had to be run at the operator’s own expense. This created scalability issues, meaning spam and abuse was a constant problem. Because of this, the basic concepts of many cryptocurrencies stem from the need for an abuse-resistant, for-profit mail forwarder:
· 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 that specifically mentioned Mixmaster.
· Ian Goldberg and Ryan Lackey (both of whom Len knew) were important figures in the mail forwarding community, and they participated in the development of an unfinished cryptocurrency called HINDE in 1998. Ian later created several early ecash clients, and Ryan became the CSO of Tezos.
So, 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 for 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 messages of any length.
Sixth, Adam Back
One person who crossed paths with Len in the small mail forwarding community was Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream, who was the first person to communicate with Satoshi.
Back’s interest in cryptocurrencies began with operating mail forwarders, 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 worked on many OpenPGP implementations and were connected in each other's PGP trust network.
Interestingly, Back himself has hinted 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’s response to this article suggests that he and Hal Finney may have worked together under pseudonyms
VII. 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 relevant accomplishments:
· His invention of cryptocurrency in his 1983 paper “Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments.”
· The invention of the blockchain, which he detailed in his 1982 paper with the code for all but one element of the blockchain, which are detailed in the Bitcoin whitepaper.
· His company Digicash created the first electronic cash system. Anonymous payments between digital pseudonyms were central to this vision.
“[Chaum] was 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 believes that without it, we are in trouble.”
While Digicash failed (in part due to its reliance on a centralized system), Chaum hoped to create a second digital currency that would offer a combination of anonymity and utility.
While many see its failure as proof that digital cash is not viable, Satoshi defends "old Chaumian money" while acknowledging the problems posed by centralization.
Many people automatically assume that electronic money is doomed to fail because many companies have failed since the 1990s. I hope that everyone understands that it is the centralized controlled nature of these systems that dooms them to failure.
VIII. Len's Research
Len worked at COSIC in Belgium until his death in 2011. During this time, he published 45 publications and held 20 conference committee positions.
Len's research focuses on developing privacy-enhancing protocols with "practical applicability" and working code. His main project (assisted by Bram Cohen) was Pynchon Gate, an evolution of the mail forwarder technology that allowed anonymous information retrieval via a distributed network of nodes without the need for a trusted third party.
Pynchon Gate and the meta-index + bucket pool architecture
This work was closely tied 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 impediment to early P2P networks.
Byzantine Fault Diagram
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 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.
During the development of Bitcoin from 2008 to 2010, Len became increasingly active in the field of financial cryptography. He joined the International Association for Financial Cryptography and gave presentations at and served on committees at 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.
Nine, Satoshi as an academic
There are a number of clues that Satoshi worked in academia during the development of Bitcoin, an idea that was shared by Gavin Andersen, founder of the Bitcoin Foundation.
"I think he was an academic, maybe a postdoc, maybe a professor, who just didn't want to draw attention."
Satoshi's code contributions and comments increased dramatically during the summer and winter vacations, but tapered off in the late spring and year-end, when academics were taking final exams or grading.
The unique construction of Bitcoin's code also suggests that Satoshi had an academic background. Bitcoin has been described as "brilliant but careless," eschewing traditional software development practices such as unit testing, but demonstrating cutting-edge security architecture and an expert understanding of academic cryptography and economics.
“Whoever did it had a deep understanding of cryptography… They’d read academic papers, they had a sharp intellect, and they combined these concepts in a really new way.”
When Dan Kaminsky, a well-known security researcher, first reviewed Satoshi’s code, he tried to penetrate it with nine 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’d never seen anything like it.”
This could indicate that Satoshi and Kaminsky had shared 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.
10. Satoshi in Europe
Since COSIC is headquartered in Leuven, Len lived in Belgium during the development of Bitcoin. This is important because many facts indicate that Satoshi lived in Europe—a major focus of the New Yorker’s early investigations.
Satoshi’s writing style reflects British English spelling and vocabulary choices, such as bloody hard, flat, maths, grey, and the dd/mm/yyyy date format. However, Satoshi also mentions the euro instead of the pound.
Bitcoin’s genesis block also contains the headline from that day’s edition of The Times (“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 was European, but the person with the necessary skills and understanding of Bitcoin’s major implications is likely to be American. Much of the cypherpunk community holds conferences and meetups together, which is one reason why there is a disproportionate number of people from the United States, especially San Francisco. Similarly, jobs that offer cutting-edge professional information security and cryptography experience are concentrated in the United States.
Oddly, although Len is American, he uses exactly the 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 happened "yesterday", but if he lived in the United States, that would be a different story.
Assuming that 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
When we checked Len’s tweet history, we found that the timestamps of Satoshi’s posts and code commits matched Len’s own late night activity very well.
XI. P2P Network
While Bitcoin was not the first cryptocurrency, it was the first cryptocurrency based on a fully P2P distributed network. Satoshi 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 needed to "understand economics, cryptography, and P2P networks," and Len had an unusually early and in-depth understanding of these three disciplines and their application to digital currencies.
Bram and Len interviewed at CodeCon
While in San Francisco, Len lived and worked with Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, the most widely used P2P protocol. During this time (2000-2002), Bram developed a revolutionary P2P network called MojoNation, which used a “Mojo Token” digital currency, making it one of the first publicly issued digital currencies.
In MojoNation’s P2P economy, “tokens” could be used in exchange for file storage, which would 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 was not just an internal accounting token, but a full currency — it could be exchanged for dollars and vice versa. Some of the early discussions about token economics involved the mechanics of the Mojo token.
One Mojo unit represents a portion of the current functionality of the entire system. If you work for me now, I’ll give you tokens, and in the future when the network is larger, those tokens will represent a portion of a larger pie, so their value will increase as you spend them.
Satoshi discussed token economics in a very similar way:
It has the potential to form a positive feedback loop; as more users are added, 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 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. Intended as a P2P alternative to centralized Napster, BitTorrent foreshadowed Bitcoin's own distributed node topology and consensus system, as well as a protocol-level incentive system. BitTorrent not only innovated on networks like Gnutella at a technical level, but also leveraged economic incentives and game theory.
Bittorent’s Design Compared to Napster
Len presciently told Bram that “BitTorrent would make him greater than [Napster founder] Sean Fanning.” Satoshi later mentioned 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 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, which facilitates a distributed, collaborative world of RPOW servers.
Digital currencies 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 screenshot
MojoNation co-founders Zooko Wilcox and Jim McCoy also became inspirations for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency pioneers. Zooko was one of Satoshi’s first collaborators and an employee of David Chaum at Digicash, and Satoshi included a link to Zooko’s blog when releasing Bitcoin v0.1 on Bitcoin.org. Zooko later founded the major privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash. He created the often-discussed “Zooko Triangle” framework.
“The Zooko Triangle is a trilemma of three properties that names of participants in a network protocol are often thought to have”
McCoy is also a major influencer in the cryptocurrency space, with Ryan Selkis of Digital Currency Group saying he believes McCoy may be Satoshi.
Hacktivism
Even by the standards of the cypherpunk community, both Len and Satoshi had particularly strong ideological convictions and a commitment 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 stands in stark contrast to their predecessors. Chaum, Stefan Brand, eCash, and others took a very different approach: filing patents, forming closed source venture capital firms, and trying to drive adoption through corporate partnerships.
This parallels Len’s extensive contributions to open source projects like PGP, Mixmaster, GNU Privacy Guard, and his extensive volunteer experience in groups like the Shmoo Group.
Satoshi has hinted at their ideological leanings several times, stating that Bitcoin is “very attractive to libertarian perspectives” and could “win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new free territory in a few years.”
Len is equally passionate about defending open knowledge and technological progress from corporate and government interference.
The pursuit of knowledge is a fundamental part of being human. Any form of prior restriction is, in my opinion, an infringement on our freedom of thought and consciousness. So not only do I hope we can avoid overly restrictive knee-jerk legislation… I don’t want to see anyone build a framework that could be misused for that purpose.
Thirteen, the End
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 problems became increasingly severe, which exacerbated the depression he had been fighting since his youth.
As a victim of stigma, Len "felt like he had to continue to maintain the illusion of being this super-capable person" and was "very afraid" 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 speech at Dartmouth. Tragically, he successfully concealed the severity of his situation from almost everyone in his life.
Few knew how far things had progressed… One thing I heard repeatedly was “We never knew, it looked like he was doing fine.”
Len speaking at Dartmouth shortly before his death
As Len built on the ideas that had come before him, one sensed that he was committed to building something that would outlast him, which is one of the reasons 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 we don’t get into 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 co-conspirators in that era, when it was still a wild time. We reimagined our world, a world full of 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 imagined that the problems we might encounter in the future would face complex and profound threats - we designed future protocols to defend against these threats. All of this was geeky utopian academic practice. I tended to keep it that way, but Len wanted to get his hands dirty.
Cypherpunks write code."
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