TechFlow news, October 8 — According to DL News, Meredith L. Patterson, widow of Len Sassaman, explicitly stated in an interview with DL News that Len Sassaman was not Satoshi Nakamoto. Patterson said: "It was the strangest part of the whole thing that HBO didn't even reach out to me when producing the documentary." She also pointed out the strongest evidence that Sassaman wasn't Nakamoto lies in beginner-level mistakes present in Bitcoin's original protocol, such as allowing Bitcoin to be sent directly to IP addresses.
Nonetheless, Bram Cohen, founder of BitTorrent and a close friend of Sassaman, appears more open to the possibility. Cohen noted that Sassaman frequently posted under pseudonyms on the Cypherpunks mailing list—the very platform where Satoshi Nakamoto announced Bitcoin. Arguments supporting the theory that Sassaman could be Nakamoto include his expertise in cryptography, the alignment between his death and Nakamoto's disappearance, and references in Nakamoto's writings to an academic conference associated with Sassaman. However, one of Sassaman's PhD advisors, Bart Preneel, considers the likelihood of his former student being Bitcoin's creator to be "extremely low."
