The Cicada 3301 Connection
source: ilikeblocks - @beniduboss - Mar 25, 2024https://twitter.com/beniduboss/status/1772148921743110163
(Since this tweet will likely get numbers, I must say that this hypothesis first appeared years ago on a now defunct forum and isn’t the fruit of my own labor)
I believe that the team behind Satoshi, yes team, is the same team behind the infamous Cicada 3301 puzzles
Hear me out
I would like first thank “Evan Hatch” for linking some of these pieces together, this wouldn’t have been possible without his work
Unfortunately I can’t thank the OP of the forum post I mentioned above since the forum is now defunct
Thank you anonymous stranger
This story begins in California in the 90s at the University of Berkley where some students and professors created a group with the goal of fabricating tools to allow for absolute privacy online
The group was aptly named the « Cyperpunks »
The group was filled with cryptography experts and activists who would create tools to better encrypt our data
We owe them Tor, Mojo, BitTorrent, PGP and so much more
Notable members were: Julian Assange, Hal Finney, Adam Back, Roger Dingledine, Bram Cohen and Len Sassanam
Let’s talk about Sassanam, who in my opinion is the perfect candidate to be one of the lead developer behind Bitcoin
He devoted his life to promoting online privacy
He was a leader in the field of public-key cryptography (Also known as the foundation of Bitcoin )
He also worked on PGP encryption, which is also central to Bitcoin
Satoshi has mentioned that Bitcoin could become the « same thing for money » that PGP was for securing files
He passed away 2 months after Satoshi posted his infamous last goodbye message
Now let’s talk about the legend Hal Finney:
He was the first person Satoshi interacted with, first to run a node
He invented the concept reusable of proof of work which is basically what Bitcoin mining is based on
Now, let’s talk about something I almost never see anybody mention and yet, I believe it’s the most dawning evidence
Both Len and Finley were developers of the remailer technology
Not gonna go in detail as to what it is, look it up yourself, but just know that:
Remailers are the technological predecessors of Bitcoin
In fact, so much so that Hal Finney himself wrote an essay in which he argued that remailers were the fondation of a potential anonymous digital economy
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20130513043044/http://finney.org/~hal/why_rem2.html
This paper is dated February 93
In 94 he proposed that remailers could be monetized via anonymous “coins”
Smart contracts were first mentioned in 1997 as an idea created to prevent remailers abuse
Ian Goldberg and Ryan Lackey worked on a cryptocurrency that never succeeded called Hinde in 1998, they were pillars of the remailers community
Best of all, Satoshi himself stated that Bitcoin first working use case was a pay-to-send email
Strangely similar to… Remailers
Adam Back, joined the cryptography space by running a remailer node
He created hashcash, a proof of work system for remailer operators to combat spam and DDOS
Back and Len are known to have collaborated together on remailer technology
Back, Len and Finney worked on PGP
Now it gets spicy
Satoshi first announced Bitcoin in October 31st 2008, when he emailed the white paper to… The Cypherpunk mailing list
Guess who was one of the biggest contributor of the said mailing list?
Len Sassaman
I mean Sassaman was literally one of if not the greatest cryptographer at the time and all his work is pertinent to Bitcoin
He spent a good portion of his last years focusing on the Byzantine Generals Problem
During Bitcoin’s development, he was increasingly active in the financial cryptography space
He joined the international Financial cryptography association and even presented conferences on the subject between 2008-2010
Now if we dig deeper, we can assume, assume not deduce, that Satoshi was not American nor Asian
His post were usually during European waking hours, he used British vocabulary like for example “bloody difficult”, he used the dd/mm/yyyy format and refers to Euros multiple times
He also used the now famous headline of “The Times- Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”
This headline was specific to the printed version, which was only available in… Europe
Len lived in Belgium and has a record of tweets of him using a very British vocabulary
Additionally, his tweets correlate exactly to Satoshis post history
More fun facts:
He had an extensive understanding of Econ, cryptography and P2P networking, all essential to bitcoin
Collaborated with Bram Cohen on Mojo in 99
Mojo used a digital currency called mojo tokens
Mojo tokens could be exchanged for the storage of files in “blocks”
The blocks were distributed to a distributed network of nodes on a public ledger
It could even be exchanged for dollars and was at the center of some of the first discussions regarding “tokenomics”
These are not proofs, but given the technical prowess that Bitcoin was at the time, very few would’ve been capable of building anything remotely comparable
When you add that to all these facts above, it’s very hard for me to believe that none of them had any involvement with BTC
There is more but I can’t write a 200 tweet thread but:
Everything fits, they had their activism motives, the technical abilities that almost nobody else had, they were first to interact with it etc etc
Sometimes we have to read in between the lines
And, even if they somehow aren’t the creators, their work was so instrumental to the technology behind Bitcoin that they, in my humble opinion, deserve to be credited in some way for the invention of Bitcoin thanks to the 2 decades of technological advancements they facilitated
Now you’re probably wondering, cool story bro wtf does this have to do with Cidada 3301
Well, let’s dive into it shall we
This is all based on the un-fucking-believable work provided by Marcus Wanner, one of if not the best Cicada puzzle solver
He is one of the few that was indeed contacted by 3301 but not only that he also managed to “enter the collective”
Let’s briefly talk about Cicada 3301, I doubt I need to explain it to you guys. It is the most infamous online mystery ever, in fact so much so that even normies know about it
Saying that Cicada 3301 was difficult would be one hell of an understatement. Solving it required knowledge in so many different areas including specific skillsets that only a handful possess.
What was the backbone of most puzzles?
Cryptography/encryption
In order to solve it, you had to be able to decrypt basic Caesar Ciphers and Atbash Ciphers all the way to RSA, AES, SHA
You also needed to be an expert in Polyalphabetic ciphers, Steganography, public key cryptography and so much more
Watch videos about it, genuinely insane
In fact, it was so difficult, that since the discovery of the Liber Primus, 57 pages of encrypted data, only 3 pages have been decrypted.
It’s been over a decade since they’ve been discovered
Thousands of the best cryptographers out there tried to decipher it, including-
the guy that deciphered the Zodiac killer's last letter.
Now tell me, who could be better placed to produce such a fucking difficult challenge that it requires the solvers to be a world-class cryptography expert?
We're not done yet
The picture below shows the message congratulating Marcus for his efforts and the invitation to their “collective”
Interestingly, the ideology behind Cicada 3301 and the Cyperpunk collective is intrinsically the same. The communication between Marcus and the people behind 3301 was solely based on online anonymity.
Nothing else
Reminds you of something yet?
But wait, as I mentioned above, at the beginning of the 90s the cypherpunks created a secured mailing list to communicate with each other
Now, this is where it gets batshit fucking crazy
Feel free to research this on your own if you don't believe me
After all, we now know about this group of extraordinarily passionate and skilled individuals, take a guess as to what domain they used to host their mailing list
No but really guess, I promise your guess can't be more wild than the truth
The first communication channel of the first major online-privacy activists, who were also the absolute leaders in cryptography over the last 2 decades just happen to name their domain using the same random fucking insect as the most infamous online mystery of all time?
How could that be a coincidence?
Genuinely, if you think that's a coincidence you must really hate maths
Only a handful, literally speaking, of experts, could’ve made such an advanced challenge
And it is for that reason that I would like to propose the hypothesis that, in fact, the likely creators of Bitcoin behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, may also be the creators of Cicada 3301
Unfortunately, like many other great hackers, Len left us due to suicide. For that reason, in memorial of Len Sassaman, I would like to share this link that brings you to the donation page of the Continuum charity that helps people with mental health issues get back on their feet
Here is the link: https://continuumct.org/crypto
If you can afford to and if you thought this thread was interesting, make a small donation in his honor. If I am right, he was one of the leading forces behind what we now know as "crypto"
This is by far the thread that took me the most time to write, I couldn't be as detailed as I wanted it to be. I hence recommend you guys to do your own research
The rabbit hole is an endless pit, I have wasted months of my life researching it
Thank you for reading
H/T to: "ilikeblocks" @beniduboss
DONATE to: https://continuumct.org/crypto