Documentary Names Hal Finney and Len Sassaman as Satoshi Nakamoto
A new documentary concludes that two cypherpunks worked together to create Bitcoin: Hal Finney wrote the code while Len Sassaman managed public communications as Satoshi Nakamoto. The theory emerged after investigators found evidence suggesting Satoshi and Finney were active simultaneously—pointing to a two-person operation.
Key Takeaway
Two cypherpunks working together explains why Satoshi and Finney could be online simultaneously.
New York Times bestselling author William Cohan and private investigator Tyler Maroney spent four years investigating Satoshi Nakamoto's identity for the Finding Satoshi documentary that aired Wednesday.
Data scientist Alyssa Blackburn analyzed Satoshi's digital rhythm using linguistic analysis and narrowed six cypherpunk suspects to just two. Only Finney and Sassaman fit the pattern, she said. It was inconceivable that Adam Back, Nick Szabo, or Wei Dai could be Satoshi based on her analysis alone.
Will Price noticed something unusual during his 16 years as Finney's boss at PGP Corp. Finney stopped making work commits for two months between October 2008 and January 2009—the exact gap between Bitcoin's whitepaper and genesis block. Price thinks Finney spent those months building Bitcoin. When investigators suggested Finney couldn't have written Bitcoin because he wasn't known for C++, Price dismissed it. To an engineer of Finney's caliber, a different language is like chicken versus steak, he said.
But Casa co-founder Jameson Lopp found instances where Satoshi and Finney were both active simultaneously. He analyzed emails between Satoshi and Mike Hearn with timestamps that showed it was highly unlikely Satoshi and Finney were the same person. One possible explanation: Satoshi was a group of people.
That's where Sassaman enters. He cared deeply about anonymity and privacy, studied under cryptocurrency godfather David Chaum, and was an expert in stylometric anonymization. Price said Sassaman would have cared about checking every reference and the precision of every part of the whitepaper—something that wasn't Finney's style. Sassaman's former roommate and BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen revealed Sassaman had pseudonyms even his best friend didn't know about. You don't make all your pseudonyms agree with each other or everyone will know who they are, Cohen said.
Sassaman publicly criticized Bitcoin in 2010 and 2011, calling it bunk and overhyped—exactly what someone trying to distance himself from his creation would do. His widow Meredith Patterson rejected claims her late husband was Bitcoin's founder.
This article was written based on reporting from Dlnews.
