Excellent article and great overview of an epochal era in cryptography history.
We’ve lost too many hackers to suicide. Aaron Swartz. Gene Kan. Ilya Zhitomirskiy. James Dolan.
I know that this was not to be an exhaustive list, but given the context, I thought Alan Turing was a notable exception and IMHO should be included.
he suffered traumatic experiences at the hands of “borderline sadistic” psychiatric practitioners
This cemented the parallel to Turing in my mind. I don't want to beleaguer the point, or take away from the quality of the article, so I will conclude by saying that listing Sassaman with Turing puts him into the well deserved highly elevated sphere of monumentally influential cryptographers who died by suicide.
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This was one of my earliest shares: #5202
Sometimes people are high functioning with machines but more troubled than usual elsewhere.
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I really like this story.
It doesn't matter if he's actually Satoshi or not. Len was a great person.
It's really crazy when you think about it. Most of the technology we use these days is supported or was invented by a small amount of people.
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That actually makes sense, I mean not that Len killed himself but the notion that Satoshi could be him or faced a similar demise. Both a truly brilliant minds, but not for this era. (see Tesla story, we have seen this before)
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