Speculation surrounding Len Sassaman as potential inventor of Bitcoin
AI Review
It has been suggested that the inventor of Bitcoin may be Len Sassaman, a late computer scientist, given his knowledge of cryptography and the suspicious timing of his death.
Late computer scientist and privacy advocate Len Sassaman has become an unexpected subject of interest as bettors place bets on an upcoming HBO documentary that will allegedly reveal the identity of Bitcoin's creator, according to Cointelegraph.
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 in the late 1980s. He later studied under blockchain inventor David Chaum.
Sassaman contributed to projects such as the Pretty Good Privacy software and its update GNU Privacy Guard. He co-founded the SaaS startup Osogato with his wife, computer scientist Meredith Patterson. At the time of his death, Sassaman was a PhD student in electrical engineering at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. He committed suicide on July 3, 2011, at the age of 31. A memorial to him was encoded in 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 that Sassaman may have been Nakamoto. He left behind numerous publications, conference presentations, and other academic work that point to his ability to invent Bitcoin. Sassaman was a member of the International Association for Financial Cryptography and a frequent speaker on financial cryptography.
Linguistic analysis also suggests that Sassaman may have been the inventor of Bitcoin, as Nakamoto went silent two months before Sassaman's death. Additionally, $64 billion in Bitcoin held by Nakamoto remains untouched.
