My Friend, Satoshi?

An HBO documentary coming out Tuesday has reopened speculation that my late friend Len Sassaman was Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin. The filmmaker claims to have confronted the person he believes is Satoshi face-to-face, which would make it unlikely Len, who committed suicide in 2011, is his suspect. Nevertheless, others have written convincingly and at length about Len’s technical chops that made him a logical Satoshi candidate.

Whatever the film claims, I’d like to share the Len that I knew, and why I, too, think it’s plausible that he was Satoshi.

Justin Newton is the CEO of Netki, a provider of identity validation services. This article is adapted from a post published on LinkedIn.

When I met Len Sassaman, he was wearing a rumpled jacket and tie. We were in history teacher Thomas Ruth’s living room at the Hill School, a boarding school in Pottstown, Pa.. Len was in his junior year, and I, an alumnus working in the data center business, was back from the San Francisco Bay Area to visit Tom for a long weekend.

Len sat on the couch. I was in a nearby chair. Tom, one of my mentors, was known for taking kids under his wing who had a difficult upbringing or a hard time fitting in. Len was one such kid. He was having trouble keeping regular eye contact and would greatly downplay his achievements.

Even though he was only 16, Len showed great promise as a computer scientist, and Tom asked if I would be willing to be a friend in the field who could help Len find his footing and his way. I owe a lot to Tom, so of course I agreed. That first day we spent about two and a half hours in Tom’s living room, drinking hot tea that was the equivalent of Jolt Cola, because it had all of the sugar, and twice the caffeine that you would expect in a teacup.

As I look back on that conversation, I remember a number of things we discussed that day, and in retrospect, Len’s ideas aligned well with who Satoshi Nakamoto was (or is).

Another mentor of mine had pointed out to me how technology and history influenced each other in cycles, and how great inventions change society and change the world. I shared this eureka moment with Len: that great skill in tech could be the lever that, if pulled hard enough, can move the world in the direction we want it to go.

This was the moment in the discussion when Len went from being passive, shy, and reserved, to passionate and deeply engaged. Until that point, he had lived in a world that was shaped by the popular kids; seeing a path where he could help shape the future, without having to be in the limelight, caused a striking and immediate change in his posture, from slouching to erect and leaning forward and his eyes from downcast to wide open and looking directly at me.

At this point, Tom sat back in his chair with a knowing smile on his face, occasionally getting up to make sure Len and I both had full cups of his infamous rocket fuel to keep the conversation going. We spent the next several hours talking about the importance of freedom of communication, online anonymity, and democratization of information. The conversation included developing open source software and standards, expressing our values through code, and creating software that could change the world, and predicting some of those impacts.