$BTC Suddenly, the late cryptographer and privacy activist Len Sassaman is in the spotlight. The reason? An upcoming HBO documentary that promises to reveal the identity of Bitcoin’s mysterious inventor. And the odds seem to be skyrocketing that it’s Sassaman.

Whoever the real Satoshi Nakamoto was, Sassaman was an unusual figure, to say the least. A child prodigy, a hacker, a rebel—the guy could have stepped out of a cyberpunk novel. Born in Pennsylvania, young Len quickly found the local private schools too small for him. As soon as he reached adulthood, he rushed to San Francisco, where he joined the cypherpunks, the digital privacy pioneers who in the late 1980s seemed like either urban madmen or prophets of a new era.

Sassaman didn't waste time on trifles and went to study with David Chaum himself - the man who, by the way, invented the blockchain. Not a bad choice of mentor for the future creator of Bitcoin, don't you think?

Our hero contributed to the development of Pretty Good Privacy and GNU Privacy Guard, programs that are essential to digital security today. And then, as if fame in narrow circles wasn’t enough, he founded the startup Osogato together with his wife, also a computer genius, Meredith Patterson.

It would seem that life was a success. But on July 3, 2011, 31-year-old Sassaman, then a graduate student at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, committed suicide. And now his name is back on everyone's lips - a mysterious entry in his memory appeared in block 138,725 of the Bitcoin blockchain.

So was Len the Satoshi? His wife Meredith is sure he wasn't. But let's look at the facts:

• Sassaman left behind an impressive list of publications and speeches. Even a non-specialist can see that this guy could have invented Bitcoin.

• He was a member of the International Association of Financial Cryptography and regularly gave talks on this topic.

• Linguistic analysis shows similarities between Sassaman's and Nakamoto's writing styles. After all, handwriting is like a fingerprint in the digital world.

• Nakamoto went silent two months before Sassaman's death.

And the cherry on top: $64 billion in Nakamoto-owned bitcoins are still sitting untouched. Maybe because their owner is no longer with us?

Well, it looks like HBO is preparing a real crypto detective for us. All that's left is to wait for the premiere and find out who was hiding under the mask of Satoshi Nakamoto.

hashtelegraph.com / Ivan Makarov

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