Interesting question that has occupied the crypto community for years: Was Len Sassaman actually Satoshi Nakamoto? The HBO documentary "Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery" by Cullen Hoback has revived this speculation and is causing intense debates.

When Hoback announced the documentary in October, it immediately sparked heated discussions on Polymarket. Bettors heavily wagered on Len Sassaman as the possible Bitcoin creator – with 44.5% of the bets placing him in first place, ahead of other candidates like Hal Finney, Adam Back, or Nick Szabo. There’s a reason for that.

Who was this Sassaman anyway? A cryptography prodigy from Pennsylvania who got involved early in the cypherpunk movement and studied under David Chaum – the legendary "godfather of cryptography." Sassaman worked on PGP, GNU Privacy Guard, and later founded the startup Osogato with his wife Meredith Patterson. His main project was Pynchon Gate, an advancement of remailer technology that enabled pseudonymous communication. Tragically, Sassaman died in 2011 at the age of 31 by suicide. A Bitcoin block later encoded a tribute to him.

What makes Len Sassaman so suspicious? The timing is remarkable: On April 23, 2011, Nakamoto sent his last email, saying he had other priorities. Two months later, Sassaman was dead. At the same time, Sassaman had worked closely with Hal Finney – and Finney was Nakamoto’s closest confidant in the early days of Bitcoin. Both were experts in remailer technology, both dealt with the Byzantine problem, the core issue of decentralized networks. Sassaman was working precisely on that – the solution was crucial for Bitcoin.

Another detail: Sassaman lived in Belgium when Bitcoin was developed. Nakamoto’s texts contain British English ("bloody difficult", "maths", "grey"), and the Genesis Block quotes the British newspaper "The Times". That fits geographically and linguistically.

But here’s the catch: Meredith Patterson, Sassaman’s widow, strongly denied this in 2021. She said her late husband was not, to the best of her knowledge, Nakamoto. That’s hard to refute – she knew him better than anyone else.

In the end, the HBO documentary will probably raise more questions than it answers. Whether Len Sassaman was truly Satoshi, we may never know for sure. But the theory is fascinating enough to take seriously.