#WeAreAllSatoshi While Sassaman had a lot of achievements, the cryptography expert was diagnosed with depression in his teens. On July 3, 2011, Sassaman died of suicide at the age of 31. Following his death, a tribute to Sassaman was encoded into Block 138725 of the Bitcoin blockchain. 

The memorial described Sassaman as “a friend, a kind soul and a devious schemer.”

Could Len Sassaman be Satoshi Nakamoto? #WeAreAllSatoshi

One thing that fuels speculation of Sassaman being Nakamoto is the timing of the Bitcoin inventor’s departure and Sassaman’s death. 

On April 23, 2011, about two months before Sassaman’s death, Nakamoto sent his final email to the Bitcoin community. The pseudonymous Bitcoin inventor said that he had a few things on his mind and had moved on to other things. After the email, Nakamoto disappeared without any further explanation.

Apart from timing, Sassaman’s working relationship with Finney, another candidate to be Nakamoto, also fuels the speculation that the deceased cryptographer could be the Bitcoin inventor. According to a blog post by Worlds founder Evan Hatch, Sassaman worked on PGP alongside Finney at the IT service provider Network Associates. 

Nakamoto worked closely with Finney in the early days of Bitcoin. Apart from Nakamoto, Finney was the first to contribute code to the protocol and run a node. The software developer corresponded extensively with Nakamoto and was also the first recipient of Bitcoin BTC$62,162.19. 

Finney and Sassaman were also experts in remailer technology, a precursor to BTC. Blockstream CEO Adam Back previously suggested that Nakamoto might have been a remailer developer. 

Hatch’s blog post also noted that Sassaman’s main project was an evolution of remailer technology called Pynchon Gate, which allowed pseudonymous information retrieval via nodes. As the work progressed, Hatch noted that Sassaman became focused on solving the Byzantine Fault, a significant obstacle for peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. #WeAreAllSatoshi