Len Sassaman, a famous cypherpunk who committed suicide in 2011, is, according to Polymarket, the most likely candidate to be unmasked as the real Satoshi Nakamoto by a new HBO documentary, due to air this coming Tuesday.
Sassaman, a well-known privacy advocate and cryptography specialist, conducted research for Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography and co-founded an annual conference for software hackers.
A popular theory put forward by Evan Leung Hatch suggests that Sassaman may be Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator and that his suicide could be linked to Nakamoto’s final message posted two months beforehand. It read, “I’ve moved on to other things and probably won’t be around in the future.”
Leung reasons that Nakamoto left “a slew of uncompleted features” and never touched his bitcoin (worth more than $60 billion today) before his abrupt disappearance. He also points to Sassaman’s work on PGP encryption and remailers, both of which he claims are key to Bitcoin’s development.
His theory even looked at Sassaman’s pattern of late-night tweets and compared them to Satoshi’s late-night posts and code alterations.
This hypothesis seems enough for Polymarket punters and Sassaman has been given a 47% chance of being revealed as Nakamoto in HBO’s documentary. Early Bitcoin contributor and Sassaman associate Hal Finney follows in second on 15%.
To no one’s surprise, bets for Craig Wright currently give him a meager 2% chance, and Elon Musk, Jed McCaleb, and Dorian Nakamoto, also feature on the list.
This is all assuming HBO will indeed reveal Nakamto’s identity. Despite Politco reporting the documentary will do just that, HBO promotional material doesn’t explicitly make the claim, and only asks the question, “In the future of money, who holds the power?”