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By 2008, when Satoshi released the Bitcoin white paper, the cypherpunk and cryptographer Len Sassaman had already been mentored by David Chaum, the "father of digital currency," whose own academic work led directly to the development of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. Chaum's creation Digicash allowed electronic cash payments between pseudonymous actors, though it failed according to Satoshi because of its centralized architecture.

Satoshi had a very rare set of skills including expertise in cryptography, economics, and P2P network engineering, and was also interested in privacy and cypherpunk philosophy. These aligned with Sassaman's own areas of expertise, which are all foundational to Bitcoin.


Specifically, Sassaman developed remailers, which are specialized servers designed to send information packets anonymously, or pseudonymously. He was the primary dev on the Mixmaster remailer protocol, which used decentralized nodes to relay "fixed-sized blocks of encypted info across a P2P network" -- a direct precursor to Bitcoin's architecture.

Alongside remailer dev Hal Finney, Sassaman also made important advances in PGP (public key) encryption, another technology central to Bitcoin's operation. And Finney was the first person after Satoshi to receive BTC, to write code for it, and to operate a BTC node.

Sassaman's academic work under Chaum focused on solving the Byzantine General's Problem, which would allow for the operation of a distributed network even if some nodes were faulty or unreliable. Solving the problem would allow the secure operation of a decentralized cryptocurrency without relying on trusted third parties, while also solving the so-called "double spend problem". Satoshi solved this with his triple-entry accounting, built on Chaum's blockchain.
Another remailer dev associate of Sassaman's was Adam Back, whose Hash Cash proof-of-work system was designed to impose a non-trivial cost to sending emails, thereby counteracting spam and DDOS attacks on remailers. It is the basis for BTC's mining. Back was the first person with whom Satoshi communicated, and Satoshi cites him in his white paper.

Other circumstantial evidence also suggests a connection between Satoshi and Sassaman. The time stamps of their posting activiites correspond closely. Due to his idiosyncratic coding and use of MLA citation formatting in the BTC white paper, Satoshi is thought to have been an academic. Satoshi's pattern suggests a European night owl who took breaks during the busiest times of the student academic calendar, and was most active during summer and winter breaks. This is the period when Sassaman was a PhD candidate under Chaum in Belgium.

Also, Satoshi and Sassaman both employed British usages of English. And Sassaman was known to use pseudonyms to post to the same cypherpunk board where Satoshi's white paper was published.

One of the greatest mysteries surrounding Satoshi is why his horde of Bitcoin, estimated to be now be worth approximately $37 billion, has not been touched since 2011. In May of that year, Satoshi wrote "I’ve moved on to other things and probably won’t be around in the future." Two months later, Sassaman killed himself.

Two weeks later, a tribute to Sassaman, in the form of an ASCII portrait captioned "Len was our friend. A brilliant mind. A kind soul, and a devious schemer" was placed on-chain in the Bitcoin transaction data, and now appears on every node.

References:


Champagne, Phil. "The Book of Satoshi: The Collected Writings of Bitcoin Creator Satashi Nakamoto." e53 Publishing. 2014


evnanhatch.eth. "Len Sassaman and Satoshi: A Cypherpunk History". Medium. February 21, 2021. <<evanhatch.medium.com/len-sassaman-and-satoshi-e483c85c2b10>>

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