Is this satoshi?
Vote nowAdam Back
Adam Back is the CEO of Blockchain technology company Blockstream. He has been involved in the development of cryptocurrency since the 1990s. His development of Hashcash later went on to power the mining part of the Bitcoin protocol. Despite his work being referenced in the Bitcoin whitepaper, Satoshi claimed to have not been aware of his paper. Adam Back claims to have talked on several occasions with Satoshi, but their conversations were never published.
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Evidence Timeline
1997
Hash Cash
Back in 1997, Adam proposed a ‘partial hash collision based postage scheme’ which aimed to use cryptography to limit email spam. What Adam described later went on to be labeled as Proof of Work, the key consensus algorithm behind Bitcoin dictating how blocks are mined on the network.Source
1998
A Crypto Vision
Adam was one of the world’s first Cypherpunks talking about the possibility of a cryptocurrency over the course of 10 years before the development of Bitcoin. He openly criticised his own and others’ work and discussed the changes needed to resolve any anonymity, scalability, and transparency issues in developing a decentralised digital currency on the Cypherpunk forums.Source
2008
One pretty big mention
Getting a mention in the Bitcoin Whitepaper is a pretty big deal. Adam’s paper on Hashcash was referenced in the paper after Wei pointed Satoshi to the paper. Satoshi claimed to have never seen it, but was Satoshi trying to get around the fact that Hashcash was his own work?Source
2008
Back to Silence
Adam Back took himself completely out of the public eye during the development of the Bitcoin project from 2009-2010. However, after Satoshi took a step back from the Bitcoin project, Adam came back on the bitcointalk.org forum and sounded like he had very advanced knowledge of the development of Bitcoin.Source
2008
Hiding Something
Back claims to have had email correspondence with Satoshi Nakamoto, but despite this, he is one of the only Cypherpunks not to publish his emails with Satoshi. Many have done this to share Satoshi’s vision for the Bitcoin project as it has grown. Could Back be the man on the other side of the emails?Source
2020
Satoshi Was British?
Both Satoshi and Back used British-English rather than American-English. Their writing style was also extremely similar, using double spaces throughout their messages and using British spellings. Almost everyone who has been linked to Satoshi has American origins apart from Adam. Could there be a reason he writes just like Satoshi?Source
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