Adam Back
Adam Back has been involved in the development of cryptocurrency since the 1990s and his development of Hashcash later went on to power the mining part of the Bitcoin protocol. He was also referenced in the Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto.
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Age
52
Loc
Mal
Nat
GB
Timeline
1997
HASHCASH
Back in 1997, Adam Back 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 labelled as Proof of Work, the key consensus algorithm behind Bitcoin dictating how blocks are mined on the network.Source
1998
A CRYPTO VISION
Back was one of the world’s first Cypherpunks to talk about the possibility of a cryptocurrency. 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
ASSISTING SATOSHI
Back was one of the first people to be contacted by Satoshi for assistance in working on Bitcoin. He gave his thoughts on how his Hashcash creation could be used in the Bitcoin mining process.Source
2008
THE GOLDEN REFERENCE
Getting a mention in the Bitcoin Whitepaper is a pretty big deal. Adam’s paper on Hashcash was referenced in the paper after Satoshi wrote, “we will need to use a proof-of-work system similar to Adam Back's Hashcash.”Source
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