In the context of this event, American cypherpunk and cryptographer Leonard Harris "Len" Sassaman has attracted the most attention of the crypto community. Users of decentralised betting platform Polymarket are inclined to believe that it is the now deceased Sassaman who will be named as the inventor of Bitcoin in the HBO documentary.

As of today, the said platform has a 36 per cent chance of Sassaman being recognised as Satoshi in the film Money Electric. This is the highest among single developers.

The probability of various developers being recognised as Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto

Meanwhile, there is a 40.5 per cent probability that there will be more than one creator of the first cryptocurrency.

Who is Len Sassaman?

According to Cointelegraph’s sources, Hoback is known for his HBO mini-series called “Q: Into the Storm.” In it, the creator claimed to have been able to uncover the identity of some of the authors of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

The latter claims that former US President Donald Trump is up against satanic paedophiles from Hollywood.

And now he is confident that he and his team have determined the real identity of the Bitcoin developer. As Hoback noted earlier, they had far more evidence than they were able to include in the film.” Here’s the trailer for the film, which focuses on Satoshi’s identity.

Len Sassaman was born on 21 March 1980 in the US state of Pennsylvania. He attended a public school in Pennsylvania and was a cryptography prodigy.

While still a teenager, he moved to San Francisco and became active in the cryptopunk community, a privacy movement that emerged in the late 1980s. He later became a student of David Chaum, often referred to as the “godfather” of cryptography.

Sassaman worked on projects for the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) programme and its update called GNU Privacy Guard. He then founded the startup Osogato with his wife and computer scientist Meredith Patterson.

Despite all his achievements, Sassaman was diagnosed with depressive syndrome as a teenager. On 3 July 2011, he took his own life at the age of 31. After his death, a message in his memory was encoded in block 138725 of the Bitcoin blockchain, calling him “a friend, a kind soul, and a cunning conspirator.”

The message about Len Sassaman on the blockchain

One factor fuelling speculation about Len Sassaman’s possible affiliation with the Satoshi Nakamoto character is the coincidence of the timing of the Bitcoin creator’s departure from public view and Sassaman’s death. On 23 April 2011 – about two months before Sassaman’s death – the developer of the first cryptocurrency sent his last email to the community.

In this publication, he said that his thoughts were occupied with other things, and he himself had switched to new projects. After that, Nakamoto disappeared without explanation.

In addition to the time period, this assumption is also influenced by Sassaman’s professional co-operation with Hal Finney, another Satoshi candidate and recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction.

According to the contents of Worlds founder Evan Hatch’s blog, Sassaman and Finney worked together on the PGP project at Network Associates. Well, in the early stages of Bitcoin’s development, Nakamoto himself worked closely with Finney. In particular, he was the first to contribute to the protocol code and launch the node. As we have already noted, he was also the first to receive BTC in a transaction from Nakamoto himself.

Developer Hal Finney and his wife Fran

Finney and Sassaman were also experts in developing remailers, the precursors to cryptocurrencies. Blockstream CEO Adam Beck has previously speculated that Nakamoto may have been involved in the emergence of these projects.

Remailer is a service that allows users to send emails anonymously by hiding the sender. It redirects emails through a series of intermediate servers, removing or altering the sender's details to maintain privacy.

Hatch’s blog also mentioned that Sassaman’s main project was to improve a remailer technology called Pynchon Gate, which allowed anonymous retrieval of information through decentralised nodes.

Possible Bitcoin developer Len Sassaman

In addition, Sassaman’s location during Bitcoin’s development also adds to the argument that he could have been Nakamoto. The cryptographer was living in Belgium at the time. Nakamoto’s writing style includes words and expressions typical of British English, such as “bloody difficult, flat, maths and grey”.

Well, the first Bitcoin block contains a headline from The Times newspaper, which was distributed in the UK and Europe.

However, the theory about Sassaman’s connection to Satoshi’s pseudonym is refuted by his own widow. On 23 February 2021, Meredith Patterson, who married Sassaman in 2006, mentioned an investigative article about Satoshi’s real identity, where her late husband was believed to be the same. She stated that Len Sassaman could not have been Satoshi Nakamoto.

Here’s a related tweet on the subject, in which she claims her ex-husband’s non-involvement in the creation of Bitcoin – at least as the primary developer.

Len Sassaman’s wife’s tweet

That said, commenters on the YouTube trailer doubt we’ll get conclusive evidence this week that a certain person was involved in the creation of Bitcoin. Also in demand are remarks that “we’re all Satoshi – except Craig Wright.”

Audience comments under the film’s trailer about the identity of Bitcoin’s creator

It’s about a fraudster who impersonated Nakamoto for years. However, in July 2024, the court recognised that he did not belong to the development of the first cryptocurrency. This was eventually recognised by Wright himself.


The premiere of the film about Satoshi Nakamoto will take place on Tuesday night to Wednesday. In general, representatives of the cryptocommunity doubt the prospect of revealing the real identity of the creator of Bitcoin, as Satoshi properly took care of its protection. However, the upcoming premiere is still of interest.