A week before the premiere of the documentary online betting markets Len Sassaman, a cryptographer who moved in similar internet circles to Satoshi, was the most likely candidate to be revealed as the creator of Bitcoin. Sassaman took his own life in 2011 at the age of 31, shortly after Satoshi’s disappearance.
The Sassaman case was like this first reported in 2021 by Evan Hatch, founder of crypto gaming platform Worlds. Whenever speculation about Sassaman periodically surfaces, attention is drawn to his widow, programmer Meredith Patterson, who considers the theory baseless.
“People were really fucking nosy and entitled. People were writing to me with a two-page list of dates and places, asking where I was at such and such a time or place,” Patterson says. “Where do you get off? A complete stranger approaches the widow and tries to interrogate her. That’s like fucking off Sergeant Joe Friday.
When Patterson learned that her ex-husband’s name might appear in the documentary, her first thought was of her parents, fearing they might be targeted to intimidate her into giving up Satoshi’s bitcoin stash. “I called my dad and said, ‘Something weird happened and it’s not our fault,'” she says. A friend who works in law enforcement in Belgium, where Patterson now lives, advised her to take shelter at her local police station if she felt unsafe.
After all, the problem wasn’t hers. “It was a relief for me and my family when they named Peter Todd,” Patterson says. “But I feel sorry for Peter Todd. Honestly, no one deserves to have a target painted on their back.
Many Bitcoin supporters, including Todd, take the view that there will be no benefit from hunting down Satoshi. They argue that, in the absence of its creator, Bitcoin has evolved under the influence of a meritocracy of ideas, in which changes are proposed and decided by community voting. Meanwhile, anyone who is accused of being Satoshi has a lot to lose, rightly or wrongly.
After the documentary aired, emails began arriving in Todd’s inbox. “Yet, [it’s] a bunch of people asking for money,” Todd says. In one correspondence observed by WIRED, an individual sent twenty-five emails over two days asking Todd for support repaying a loan.