12-22-2024 
Faketoshi Series Part 4: Len Sassaman
8 October, 2024
|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? The pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin was a mystery to the computer science and cryptography world for many years. While Dr. Craig Wright was doxed as Bitcoin’s creator by Wired and Gizmodo in 2015, and then declared to be the only man on earth who is NOT Satoshi by a United Kingdom judge in 2024, the politics of Bitcoin have muddied the waters and made a rational discussion of the facts very difficult to have with a mainstream audience. Since then, the term “Faketoshi” has become ubiquitous with anyone who makes claims about the murky history of Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto. This is largely because of the perverse incentives of wealth that have been created in the gray areas where the truth hasn’t shined a light, and this article aims to clarify what it means to be a Faketoshi in 2024.
The small blocker BTC crowd holds a deeply political view about the nature of the Bitcoin protocol and its governance and, therefore, gives a lot of weight to candidates who agree principally with their view of permanently small blocks, UASF governance (User Activated Soft Fork), and an ethos of “code-is-law” from the cypherpunk community. While some candidates, like Dave Kleiman, have been proven in court not to have helped create Bitcoin, a great deal of populist candidates still get brought up regularly.
We previously discussed why Nick Szabo and Adam Back’s reputations as maybe being Satoshi fell apart and how they have benefited tremendously from the ambiguity they maintain on the subject.
Inspired by rumors from a new HBO documentary, we will dig into the background and facts about Len Sassaman, a longtime critic of Bitcoin who might be the “Satoshi DeJure” of the coming conversation.
Len Sassaman
Sassaman was a cypherpunk, cryptographer and privacy advocate, and he was involved personally and commercially in numerous projects focused on online anonymity and cryptographic security. He certainly had the technical acumen to have been Satoshi Nakamoto, but the argument for Sassaman being Satoshi falls apart upon closer examination. Both his criticisms of Bitcoin and his differing approach to online privacy and security show that if Sassaman were Satoshi, Bitcoin would have likely been designed in a fundamentally different way. Moreover, the timeline of his death and the actions of Satoshi after his passing further cast doubt on this theory.
In this analysis, we explore the reasons why Len Sassaman, despite his brilliance and dedication to privacy, is an implausible candidate for Satoshi Nakamoto.
1. Post-mortem evidence: The “I am not Dorian Nakamoto” post
One of the most compelling pieces of evidence against Sassaman, being Satoshi, is purely chronological. Sassaman passed away in 2011, tragically taking his own life. However, almost three years later, Satoshi Nakamoto posted a message in March 2014 on the P2P Foundation forum stating, “I am not Dorian Nakamoto,” in response to a Newsweek article falsely identifying a man named Dorian Nakamoto as Bitcoin’s creator.
This indicates that Satoshi was still active, at least to some degree, long after Sassaman’s death. If Sassaman were Satoshi, this post would be inexplicable.
2. Ideological differences and cryptographic preferences
Len Sassaman was a champion of privacy and cryptographic security, but his approach and ideology differ greatly from that of Satoshi Nakamoto. Sassaman’s work was deeply rooted in the cypherpunk movement, while Nakamoto was pretty publicly opposed to cypherpunk values and even had negative things to say about various cypherpunks like James Donald and Julian Assange.
Sassaman dedicated much of his career to developing tools for secure, private communication, such as Mixmaster, a remailer that anonymized email traffic. Sassaman’s involvement with PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and his close relationships with other cryptographers shaped his worldview around strong anonymity and the need for hidden, encrypted communications.
Satoshi’s Bitcoin, on the other hand, was designed with a transparent ledger that is publicly visible. Every Bitcoin transaction is recorded on an open, immutable blockchain, which is fundamentally different from the types of obfuscating technologies Sassaman worked on. If Sassaman were the creator of Bitcoin, he would have likely designed a system with a more deliberate focus on obfuscation and encryption at the transactional layer.
Instead, Bitcoin, as designed by Satoshi, allows pseudonymity but not anonymity. Sassaman would have almost certainly leaned more towards anonymity solutions, such as confidential transactions or mixing, as foundational features of the protocol.
3. Len’s public criticisms of Bitcoin
Sassaman’s views on Bitcoin are on public record, and they do not align with what one would expect from its creator. Sassaman critiqued aspects of Bitcoin’s design, and generally approached it in an unsophisticated manner. He recognized the potential of the technology but was also critical of its shortcomings, especially around its perceived lack of anonymity compared to other cryptographic tools he valued.
If Sassaman were Satoshi, he would have been openly criticizing his own creation—or at the very least, failing to explain or defend the choices made in Bitcoin’s design.
Moreover, his criticisms were precise and indicated a deeper difference in vision. For instance, his push for stronger transaction and ledger obfuscation suggests that had he been behind Bitcoin, the protocol would have focused much more on confidentiality from the outset.
He sounds like Zooko here and would likely have made bitcoin resemble anonymity-focused currencies like Monero or Zcash more than the pseudonymous, transparent ledger that Bitcoin offers.
4. Skillset vs. Implementation: What Sassaman would have done differently
Sassaman’s deep expertise in privacy protocols would have influenced Bitcoin’s design in specific ways that we do not see in the actual implementation. Given his background in mixed networks and encrypted communications, Sassaman would have likely implemented stronger anonymity features and would not have built Bitcoin as a UTXO-based system. The fact that Satoshi chose an open, verifiable and auditable ledger runs counter to Sassaman’s entire philosophy, which prioritized secrecy and cryptographic protections against surveillance.
Sassaman was also a practiced commercial cryptographer, a PhD student and a researcher with the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography (COSIC) research group. In contrast, Satoshi Nakamoto was heavily presumed not to be a professional coder or cryptographer. Notably, Nakamoto used elliptic curve secp256k1, which is a particularly uncommon curve. A professional cryptographer of Sassaman’s pedigree would almost certainly have chosen a curve that conformed to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) caliber. When asked about it by Laszlo Hanyecz, Nakamoto was said to say, “I had a bunch of people look at it, and they told me this was good,” according to a 2020 interview with Cointelegraph. This is a very bizarre way to pick an elliptical curve to secure the system for someone who deeply understands cryptography.
Gavin Andresen, Bitcoin’s second lead maintainer, also once called Nakamoto’s use of SSL “kind of naive” and also criticized his lack of documentation for things like Schnorr or Lamport signatures, which would have been standard practice for a cryptographer even if they weren’t used.
Andresen also pointed out Nakamoto’s general lack of sophistication on the topic of cryptography in Bitcoin.
Andresen closed by saying, “But key blinding and group signatures are concepts from Crypto 101… Satoshi… didn’t have a deep understanding of all the cutting edge crypto research that’s going on.”
Peter Todd also mentions Satoshi’s lack of cryptography chops on Reddit saying, “He made many design decisions that suggest he wasn’t a ‘professional’ cryptographer… the fact that the defender in the Bitcoin system only has a linear advantage over the attacker, rather than an exponential one, really runs contrary to how cryptographic systems are designed, yet in the case of Bitcoin social and economic factors make such a system work anyway; that’s the kind of idea that often takes an outsider with a fresh perspective…”
Sassaman, on top of being a far more sophisticated cryptographer than Satoshi Nakamoto, also had a distinct preference for usability in privacy tools. He advocated for systems that were not only secure but also accessible to the average user. Bitcoin, in its early forms, had a steep learning curve, and its command-line interface and wallet security requirements were not necessarily intuitive or user-friendly. A Sassaman-designed currency would very likely have prioritized ease of use and might have even delayed its launch to ensure more polished user experience—a contrast to Bitcoin’s lean, open-source release and iterative development over time.
5. Personal style and public engagement
Sassaman’s public persona and communication style are markedly different from that of Satoshi. Satoshi was consistently measured, concise and exhibited a singular focus on the technical implementation of Bitcoin while staying notably silent on politics. Sassaman, by contrast, was outspoken, openly collaborative and deeply engaged with other cypherpunks and cryptographers on privacy as a political issue. If Sassaman were Satoshi, we would likely have seen some overlap in style or engagement between his known public comments and Satoshi’s writings. Moreover, given Sassaman’s willingness to collaborate, he might have been more transparent about Bitcoin’s development process or at least sought input from his peers, particularly those in the cryptographic community he knew well, which included folks like Hal Finney, David Chaum and Bram Cohen.
It is also worth noting that Satoshi demonstrated a clear intent to step back and disappear from the public eye as Bitcoin gained traction. Sassaman, by nature, was more inclined to engage in dialogue, debate, and further development of the tools he believed in. The dispassionate, hands-off exit that Satoshi made contrasts starkly with Sassaman’s approach to his own projects.
6. The consequences of misidentification and the importance of correct attribution
The case of Len Sassaman as a Satoshi candidate underscores an interesting issue about the attempts to “unmask” Satoshi Nakamoto. A brilliant mind and a pioneer in the privacy and cryptographic community, Sassaman’s legacy stands on its own merits, independent of Bitcoin’s creation, and we don’t need to shoehorn him into the Bitcoin conversation. Misattributing him as Satoshi risks muddying both his legacy and that of Bitcoin. Theoretical conjecture about Satoshi’s identity has been rampant over the years, from Hal Finney to Nick Szabo to Adam Back, but what remains clear in each case—including Sassaman—is that their ideologies, technical approaches and public personas do not align with those of Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, and that’s a good thing.
Bitcoin should absolutely stand on its own merit independent of the cypherpunk movement, the classic cryptography community and the classic cryptocurrency community.
Conclusion: Len Sassaman, a visionary but not Satoshi
Len Sassaman was a remarkable figure in the cryptographic community, but he was not Satoshi Nakamoto. From the differences in their design philosophies to the discrepancies in their public engagement and the actions Satoshi took after Sassaman’s death, the evidence consistently points away from Sassaman being the mysterious creator of Bitcoin. While his contributions to privacy and secure communication continue to be influential and important, they exist on a different trajectory from Bitcoin’s transparent ledger and the principles that guided Satoshi’s vision.
His widow has also come out to state Sassaman was not Satoshi, and similarly to the voice of Fran Finney, it’s important to respect the privacy of the widows by leaving them out of a largely toxic Bitcoin discussion.
Plus, Sassaman’s brilliance and his mental health struggles deserve to be recognized and respected in their own rights, not as a footnote in the misguided, malicious search for Satoshi Nakamoto.
Watch: Building the future with blockchain: Insights with Ty Everett
Recommended for you
2024 has been a defining year for blockchain, and looking ahead to 2025, let's anticipate a year of breakthroughs across...
December 10, 2024
Vertical AI agents and scalable blockchains don’t need to be rivals, as they can complement each other if implemented effectively.
December 9, 2024
