You know, I recently came across an interesting story that makes us look at the origin of Bitcoin in a new way. It’s about a person whose name is almost forgotten, although his contribution to cryptography and decentralized systems is enormous. His name was Len Sassaman.

We all know that Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, remains a mystery. For years, people have been building theories about who he might be. Some point to Hal Finney, others to Nick Szabo, and some to Adam Back. But there is one figure who has been appearing more and more frequently in the rankings of likely candidates — Len Sassaman.

Why him? Let’s figure it out.

First, we need to understand who Len Sassaman was. He was a true cyberpunk — in the full sense of the word. Smart, fearless, idealistic. From childhood, he was self-taught in cryptography and protocols. By the age of 18, he had already joined the Internet Engineering Group, which was developing fundamental TCP/IP protocols. Imagine: a teenager from a small town in Pennsylvania participating in the creation of the foundations of the internet.

In his teenage years, Len was diagnosed with depression. Unfortunately, his experience with psychiatrists was traumatic — treatment bordering on cruelty. This left a deep scar and distrust of authority figures. Later, this would become an important moment in his life.

In 1999, Len moved to the Bay Area and quickly became a central figure in the cyberpunk community. He lived with Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, and actively participated in the legendary cyberpunk mailing list — it was there that Satoshi first announced Bitcoin. Other hackers remember him as someone both brilliant and completely carefree. At cyberpunk parties, he chased squirrels, and in his car, he carried a “get out of jail free” card in case he was stopped by police.

But behind this carefree attitude was serious work. Len Sassaman became one of the leading experts in public key cryptography — the foundation of everything Bitcoin is built on. By age 22, he was already speaking at conferences. Together with well-known open-source activist Bruce Perens, he founded a startup in cryptography. When the startup went bankrupt due to the dot-com crash, Len joined Network Associates and helped develop PGP encryption — the very encryption that Satoshi later cited as a model for Bitcoin.

At Network Associates, Len worked alongside Hal Finney on PGP. Finney was the second developer of PGP and the first person besides Satoshi to contribute code to Bitcoin. This was an important circle of people, and Len Sassaman was at its very center.

But what’s truly interesting: Len and Finney shared a rare and relevant skill — both were remailer developers. Remailers were the predecessors of Bitcoin, specialized servers for anonymous message sending. This was the infrastructure on which the cyberpunk network was built. Len was the lead developer and operator of Mixmaster, the most famous remailer of that time. He also worked as a systems engineer on the privacy project Anonymizer.

You know what’s fascinating? The architecture of Bitcoin is strikingly similar to that of remailers — only instead of messages, nodes transmit transaction data. This is no coincidence. People who developed remailers were the first to understand the need for digital currencies. They ran these systems at their own expense, which created scalability and spam problems. It was precisely from this necessity that the idea of digital money was born.

In 2004, Len managed to land his dream job — researcher and PhD candidate at the COSIC research group in Leuven, Belgium. His supervisor was David Chaum, a man often called the father of digital currency. Chaum invented digital cash as early as 1983, created the concept of blockchain in 1982, and launched DigiCash — the first electronic money system. Few can boast of working directly with Chaum. Len Sassaman could.

At COSIC, Len built an outstanding track record: 45 publications, 20 committee positions at conferences. His main project — Pynchon Gate, created together with Bram Cohen — was an evolution of remailer technology. As he worked on Pynchon Gate, Len gradually focused on solving the Byzantine problem — one of the main obstacles in early P2P networks. This was precisely the problem that Satoshi later solved with blockchain.

The timing of Bitcoin’s development coincides with the period when Len Sassaman was working at COSIC. He lived in Belgium, attended cryptography and financial cryptography conferences, was a committee member. He was at the heart of everything happening in the cryptographic community.

Now, pay attention to strange coincidences. Satoshi used British English — words like “damn,” “flat,” “mathematics,” and date formats in dd/mm/yyyy. But he mentioned euros, not pounds. The genesis block contains a headline from The Times of January 3, 2009 — a newspaper circulated in the UK and Europe. And Len Sassaman was an American living in Europe, and he also used British English just like Satoshi.

An analysis of Satoshi’s commit history shows that he worked at night in the European time zone. Activity increased during summer and winter holidays but dropped during exams — as if he were a teacher or student. Looking at Len’s activity history, his posting and coding times closely match Satoshi’s nighttime activity.

Another detail: Satoshi’s code was described as “brilliant but not rigorous,” demonstrating advanced security architecture and deep understanding of academic cryptography. This perfectly describes Len Sassaman’s style — someone with deep roots in academic cryptography through work with Chaum, yet also a practical hacker developing real code.

Security researcher Dan Kaminsky, upon first reviewing Satoshi’s code, attempted penetration testing with nine vulnerabilities. But each time he found a flaw, there was already a line in the code preventing it. Kaminsky was stunned. Coincidentally, Len Sassaman later became a co-author with Kaminsky on a paper about attack methods on public key infrastructure.

Len lived and worked with Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent. Between 2000 and 2002, Bram developed MojoNation — a revolutionary P2P network with its own digital currency in the form of Mojo tokens. It was one of the first publicly released digital currencies. Files were encrypted, encoded into “blocks,” uploaded to a distributed network, and recorded in a public ledger — very reminiscent of blockchain. Although MojoNation eventually collapsed due to hyperinflation, Satoshi clearly studied this system and deliberately designed Bitcoin to avoid the same fate.

In 2002, Len and Bram co-founded the CodeCon conference dedicated to projects with real, working code. At CodeCon 2005, Hal Finney demonstrated RPOW — a system of reusable proof-of-work via a modified BitTorrent client. It was a prototype of digital P2P currency. Also demonstrated at the first CodeCon were Adam Back’s HashCash and Mnet — a decentralized successor to MojoNation.

Hal Finney, Adam Back, Len Sassaman — all were in the same community, developing components that would later become Bitcoin. They knew each other, worked together, discussed the same issues.

Now, the saddest part of the story. On July 3, 2011, Len Sassaman tragically took his own life at age 31. He struggled with long-term depression and functional neurological disorders. After an incident in 2006, he began experiencing increasingly severe seizures. He felt stigmatized, afraid that his worsening health would end his work and disappoint those he cared about. Despite this, he continued working, writing articles, even giving lectures at Dartmouth College. Few knew how serious his condition was.

This coincides with Satoshi’s disappearance. Two months before his death, Len received Satoshi’s last message: “I’ve moved on to other things, and I may no longer be around.” After 169 code commits and 539 publications, Satoshi simply vanished.

We have lost too many talented people to suicide. Aaron Schwartz, Jin Kang, Ilya Zhytomirsky, James Dolan. All victims of an epidemic of shame and depression that hampers technological progress itself. Imagine if the creator of Bitcoin had died before its completion? What could they have created if they had been cared for and respected?

Whoever Satoshi was, he undoubtedly stood on the shoulders of giants. Bitcoin is the accumulated result of decades of research and discussion in the cyberpunk community. Len Sassaman undoubtedly contributed indirectly to this. But the main question remains: who wrote the code, launched the first node, and published content under the pseudonym Satoshi?

To synthesize and implement all the ideas on which Bitcoin is based, this person or team would have needed a unique experience spanning many fields: open key infrastructure, academic cryptography, P2P network design, security architecture, privacy technologies. They would have had deep roots in the cyberpunk community and strong connections with key figures. And they would have needed ideological conviction and hacker spirit to anonymously build a system that until then remained in the realm of theory.

Looking back at Len’s life, I see all these traits. I think Len Sassaman was probably one of the direct participants in creating Bitcoin. Maybe even the main one.

This is not just a theory. It’s a reflection on what talents we have lost, what ideas remain unspoken, what systems remain unfinished. Len Sassaman was a cyberpunk in its purest form — a person who believed that cryptography and decentralization could protect freedom. He dedicated his life to this idea.

In every Bitcoin node, there is an epitaph — a memorial to Len Sassaman. It may be coincidence, but it’s a coincidence that feels too fitting. Len is almost immortalized in the blockchain, in a system that embodies everything he believed in.

We must remember such people. Not only what they created but who they were. Their struggles, their ideals, their humanity. Because technology is not just code and algorithms. It’s people. And when we lose such people, we lose not only their work but also the future they could have built.