Those numbers never lie; they are just silent, like him.
I first saw Len Sassaman's name in a cryptography mailing list one late night. It was the autumn of 2008, and the air was filled with the dust of financial collapse. The words in the list were cold and precise, discussing elliptic curve cryptography and hash functions. Then, amidst a pile of technical jargon, a passage appeared with a human touch - someone described "a completely peer-to-peer electronic cash system" in poetic language.
The one who signed as Satoshi Nakamoto spoke in a way that resembled Len.
1. The Rain in Leuven
In 1999, it always rained in Belgium. In the computer lab at the University of Leuven, 21-year-old Len Sassaman stared at the flickering code on the screen, his fingers tapping out a rhythm that resembled desperation on the keyboard. Outside, rainwater slid down the spires of Gothic buildings like countless transparent snakes.
At that time, Len still had shoulder-length blond hair and liked to wear a black hoodie with frayed edges. His professor remembered this American exchange student always being the last to leave the lab, "as if he were in love with the machines." No one knew what he was coding; the code looked like cryptographic algorithms, but mixed with strange redundant instructions, as if sending ciphertext to some invisible recipient.
"True privacy requires complete chaos." He said to the only Chinese exchange student left in the lab one rainy night, his blue eyes appearing sickly bright under the glow of the monitor. That student later wrote on his blog that Len's fingers trembled neurotically as he said this, as if enduring some invisible pain.
In 2001, Len joined the cypherpunk mailing list. His first email caused a stir - he proposed an anonymous communication system based on a mix network, ending the message with a poem: "Packets embrace in the dark / like lost lovers / never knowing if each other truly exists."
This characteristic of blending romanticism with technological fervor later reappeared in Satoshi Nakamoto's writing.
2. The Sigh of the Mixer
In a steampunk-style café in Berlin, copper pipes wind across the ceiling. In 2005, Len began to frequently appear at such underground hacker gatherings. He became thin, his blond hair cut into a military-style buzz cut, and he had a Bitcoin-shaped silver earring in his left ear - a symbol that was misunderstood at the time.
"The financial system is violent." He said softly to a group of young hackers in a corner of the café, as if talking to himself, "We need to build an escape tunnel." Someone recalled later that the prototype of the encrypted payment system Len demonstrated that night was astonishingly similar to the design in the Bitcoin white paper three years later.
His cohabitant girlfriend Emmy wrote in her diary: "Len has been waking up at three in the morning lately, then spending the whole night writing code that he refuses to explain. One day I found dozens of papers scattered on the study floor, filled with mathematical formulas, with a big 'B' drawn in red in the center."
In the spring of 2008, Len's behavior began to change. He deleted all his social media accounts but remained active under different identities on cryptography forums. The most notable was an account called "Finney" - which was later confirmed to be the username of early Bitcoin developer Hal Finney, but some insisted that the style of the initial posts was entirely Len's.
3. The Silent Key
On October 31, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper. On the same day, Len sent an email to Emmy with only three words: "It's started. Goodbye."
In the following three months, the cryptography community witnessed a strange overlap: whenever someone raised technical doubts in Satoshi Nakamoto's posts, Len would publish a detailed explanation on another forum; when Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared for weeks, Len's colleagues confirmed he was "in seclusion developing a disruptive project."
The most intriguing evidence came from the time difference. The traffic logs of the Bitcoin forum showed that Satoshi Nakamoto's online time completely corresponded to daytime in Europe, where Len was living in Brussels at the time. When journalists later asked about this, his response was a sad smile: "Time zones are the easiest things to forge."
On January 3, 2009, the Bitcoin genesis block was born. On the same day, Len's code repository appeared with an encrypted folder named "Genesis" that required a 256-bit key to open - which was the bit size of the SHA-256 algorithm. No one knew what was hidden inside.
4. The Disappearing Hash Value
On July 3, 2011, in an apartment in Brussels, Emmy discovered Len's body hanging from the door frame of his study. The coroner determined that the time of death was 12 hours after the last appearance of the ID "Satoshi Nakamoto" on the Bitcoin forum. On the desk sat a laptop with a physically destroyed hard drive, next to a note: "Private keys have been burned."
On the day of the funeral, cypherpunks exchanged Len's favorite poems via PGP encrypted emails. Hal Finney - the Bitcoin pioneer who later also fell ill - uploaded a video from his wheelchair: "Some people choose to completely disappear; that is their right."
But the internet never believes in coincidences. When people sorted through Len's belongings, they found that his notebook from 2007 was filled with tree diagrams similar to the Bitcoin blockchain; his college roommate suddenly recalled Len drunkenly saying, "I want to create a money that even God can't track."
Most chillingly, two weeks before his suicide, Len sent encrypted files to several close friends; when decrypted, they contained a recording: "If you hear this, it means I have turned into a hash value... Remember, all important keys are hidden in the hexadecimal of the genesis block."
5. The Undecryptable Will
Today, outside that apartment in Brussels, Bitcoin believers often come to "pilgrimage." The administrator said that every midnight, the motion-sensor lights in the hallway would eerily turn on, "as if someone were going upstairs to check the old email."
Cryptographers are still debating the clues: Why did Satoshi Nakamoto never use English idioms? Because Len's mother tongue was actually Dutch. Why was there a coding style from the Belgian postal system in early Bitcoin code? Why, on the day Len committed suicide, did an anonymous account send a blank email to Satoshi Nakamoto's old email address?
Perhaps the saddest evidence came from the belongings organized by Emmy. In the dark layer of Len's wallet, there was a receipt from 2010 that listed "graphics card" in the item column, with a note: "For the child who can never speak." - Bitcoin mining was originally done using graphics cards.
The rain started falling again. I closed the screen filled with code and remembered what Len wrote in an email: "Anonymity is not hiding, but the freedom to become anyone." At this moment, Satoshi Nakamoto's account balance remained unchanged: 1,000,000 bitcoins of silence.
Those numbers never lie. They have just turned into gravestones.
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