👁️ Why Len Sassaman Was Not Satoshi Nakamoto

Insights from original Sassaman theorist Evan Hatch. Also, AI captures California's legal system; the NSA spy-in-chief did investment fraud.

Hello, and welcome to your weekly Dark Markets news roundup. This week we anticipate HBO’s theory of bitcoin’s creation, and examine some cases of quite literal deep state fraud.

ICYMI: The latest draft excerpt of my forthcoming Sam Bankman-Fried is The Horse’s Mouth, a brief examination of Sam Bankman-Fried’s enthusiasm for being very bad at lying. It also includes a brief prelude detailing my research process.

Scroll down to learn more about Len Sassaman-as-Satoshi Nakamoto, with excerpts from my interview with Evan Hatch, who first floated the theory. First, some brief news highlights.

NSA Superspy’s Company Was a Theranos-like Fraud

God damn, I love this stupid story.

Kieth Alexander was the director of the National Security Agency who oversaw and defended mass spying on Americans. In other words, he’s an anti-American traitor who deserves to spend a couple of decades at Guantanamo before having his body strung up along the shore of Ellis Island as a warning to other miscreants.

He is also, it seems, an investment fraudster who could give Chamath Palihapitiya a run for (some other sucker’s) money. In 2021 - a truly auspicious year for bullshit - he founded IronNet, which claimed to be able to monitor for terrorist activity via network spying, what the AP characterizes as “a private NSA.” It reached a valuation of $3 billion.

But IronNet did not create a working product. Instead, IronNet was, in the words of its own former VP Mike Berly, a fraud “just like Theranos”. Moreover, the company managed to get entangled with sketchy Russians.

A fitting end for Keith “Fuckface” Alexander, last of his name. Salt the earth on your way out so nothing grows in your footsteps, would you?

AI Safety is So Crucial the Tech Industry Killed Its Premier Legislation

The weirdest thing about “AI Safety,” to me, is that people actually believe in the comic-book-ass scenarios cooked up by sentient fedora Eliezer Yudkowsky and weepy techno-woo-artist Ray Kurzweil. But they do! And they work at places like CAIS, the Center for AI Safety, and they write legislation sincerely intended to stop the Terminator from coming back to murder John Connor.

Some of them are then surprised when the people actually in charge of the tech industry kill that legislation, as Brian Merchant details excellently over at Blood in the Machine. At first glance I thought Merchant was also surprised, but no, he seems to actually grasp that “AI Safety” is a misdirect designed to trap well-intentioned but naive people in a dead end. Hopefully if stuff like this keeps happening, they’ll realize they’re being used and move on to adult pursuits not premised on mistaking science fiction for reality.

The Len Sassaman-Satoshi Theory

Len Sassaman, with an Ascii portrait and rememberance embedded in the Bitcoin Blockchain following his death by suicide. (Via HelloToken/Dordinals)

As I write this on Monday, October 7, director Cullen Toback and HBO are poised to do the most dangerous thing a journalist can do: Reveal the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin.

Toback also directed the really good “Q: Into the Storm,” and convincingly sussed out who had been posing as the secret informant “Q”. So I’m really looking forward to watching this thing when it drops at 9pm Tuesday - and the idea that it unmasks Satoshi has been getting a lot of traction.

A consensus is emerging among crypto types that the documentary will argue that cryptographer Len Sassaman was the man behind the original cryptocurrency. I really don’t know how this idea emerged, but Sassaman has been the leading candidate on Polymarket, and a memecoin named after Sassaman’s cat was briefly a hit on Pump.Fun. (PSA: Don’t gamble on memecoins. Pump.Fun is a platform for industrialized fraud.)

Sassaman would be an interesting choice, since he was floated as a candidate for Satoshi-hood in 2021, in a very well-researched and convincingly argued Medium post by a former VC named Evan Hatch. I interviewed Hatch at the time, because I found his arguments compelling.

But as far as I can tell I never published anything on the subject, because there were also some pretty clear reasons Sassaman couldn’t be Satoshi. By and large, informed people in the community moved on from that theory very quickly. Assuming nothing dramatic has changed, if Toback does wind up going with the Sassaman theory, it won’t have a substantive impact on the conversation around Satoshi.

The last major attempt to unmask Satoshi was so embarrassing, in fact, that a full decade has passed before someone tried again. In 2014, Newsweek and reporter Leah McGrath Goodman decided that a Japanese-American model train enthusiast named Dorian Nakamoto was the creator of Bitcoin, based on mind-bogglingly bad research and reasoning - and without a moment’s consideration of what their alleged findings might mean for the man getting fingered. Way back in 2014 (and possibly because the claim was so patently halfwitted) Dorian only experienced fairly minor annoyances. If McGrath did the same thing today, she’d probably be putting her ginned-up Satoshi’s life and their family’s safety at risk from kidnappers and extortionists, who now know exactly what crypto is.

Strangely enough, it’s thanks to Dorian Nakamoto’s suffering that we can be confident Len Sassaman isn’t Satoshi.

Who Was Len Sassaman?

“If it was Len, it was someone who was on the forefront of personal privacy technology, and was active under all these different pseudonyms. There are things that we may never know about his life.” - Evan Hatch

The most important thing to know about Len Sassaman is that, by any and all accounts, he was beloved within the cypherpunk community, and his suicide was a horrific tragedy for those close to him. If you have ever considered taking your own life, understand that you, too, are loved. In the U.S., please dial 988, the national crisis hotline, for help.

But yes, Sassaman was part of the core “cypherpunk” mailing list starting around 1999. The group/list also included people like Julian Assange, Adam Back (whose featuring in the HBO doc would support Sassaman as the target), Craig Wright (shudder) and Nick Szabo (also shudder). Sassaman worked on public key cryptography and remailers (with Hal Finney), as well as TCP/IP.

Sassaman also entered graduate study in 2004 under digital cash pioneer David Chaum. The fact that Satoshi’s posts spiked during breaks in school is one element of Hatch’s Sassaman theory.

Sassaman was also an American living in Europe at the time of the Bitcoin whitepaper - and that’s another core element of Hatch’s theory. Both Len and Satoshi had elements of British English to their writing, and Satoshi posted at what would have been daytime in Belgium. But the cypherpunks familiar with the principles of what would become Bitcoin were by and large Americans. Very few candidates squared that circle, and Sassaman was one.

There is more to Hatch’s theory, which is worth reading on historical and educational grounds.

But Hatch made clear at the time it was just an inferential theory. And it’s probably wrong.

Why Len Sassaman Isn’t Satoshi Nakamoto

The most important thing to know about Hatch’s theory may not be what it argues, but what was going on in the realm of Satoshi Studies in 2021. In short, believe it or not, Craig Wright was riding way too high.

You may have heard that more recently, a court found definitively that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto. CRAIG WRIGHT IS NOT SATOSHI NAKAMOTO. (It’s a sentence we fought for the right to say without frivolous legal threats from that delusional little homonculous, so repeating it is just value for money). But back in 2021, he was still firing off lawsuits like the ink was free (since Calvin Ayre was paying for it).

Anyway, Hatch’s motivations for floating Sassaman as a Satoshi candidate included the existence of some compelling evidence. But getting Craig Wright out of the limelight was another, quite strong motivation.

If it were Sassaman, Hatch told me, “It just says things about what [Satoshi’s] intent was and what his ethos was … You have Craig on the one hand, and [then on the other hand] you have people in the background doing the work and not trying to get too much attention. Reframing this around [those quieter contributors] would be great.”

“And also, I’m just tired of [the search for Satoshi] … it is embarrassing. Let’s focus on the technology.”

While Sassaman worked on secure communication, he wasn’t involved in the e-cash project, whose origins and community stretch all the way back to David Chaum’s work in the 1970s. While the remailers that were Sassaman’s focus had a lot of problems and challenges in common with Bitcoin, including the Byzantine General’s problem, they’re still quite different.

Sassaman also explicitly criticized Bitcoin for its lack of anonymity. Sassaman’s main concern was true digital privacy, while Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous - which, as we have learned in the years since its creation, aren’t even close to the same thing. Sassaman’s wife has also denied that he was Satoshi, which isn’t definitive, but is directionally supportive.

But the really simple reason that Len Sassaman isn’t Satoshi, grim though it may be, is that Satoshi was still alive in 2014, when he briefly posted from a confirmed account that he was not Dorian Nakamoto.

So, apologies to your memecoin bags, and maybe to HBO, but no, Len Sassaman didn’t invent Bitcoin. He seems to have been an amazing guy, and his death a massive tragedy whose consequences continue to ripple outwards. On the bright side, at least he’s not here to suffer the excruciating consequences of getting Satoshi-jacketed, so thank God for small blessings.

All that said, I’m actually skeptical that the HBO team will make such a direct claim at all. “Into the Storm” did a great job of laying out the evidence for its claim, without strictly accusing the subject. It was a responsible piece of work - and I doubt the directors would be less careful with the memory of a subject who passed away under tragic circumstances.

We’ll find out tomorrow later today, though!