Kamal Ghorui
Adam Back has spent weeks being asked yet again, by various people, whether he is the inventor of Bitcoin. He is not, he says. He has been saying so for years and again since the New York Times suggested in early April, after dissecting writings from the early cypherpunk era, that Adam Back was the most credible candidate yet for Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous figure who released Bitcoin’s design paper in 2008 and disappeared in 2011. A documentary released weeks later proposed two other candidates. Back has done what he usually does, which is to deny the attribution, explain why people keep making it, and return to work. “It’s not me, for the record,” he said in late April, in a polite tone. “It’s very hard to prove a negative.”‘Mystery around founder helped Bitcoin’s growth’The repetition does not seem to bother him. The mystery has been useful, he says. A Bitcoin without a known founder is a Bitcoin without a single point of capture, without a chief executive to subpoena, a founding team to coerce, a charismatic figure whose departure could destabilise the network. That, he believes, is part of why the asset has reached the position it now occupies. “It helps Bitcoin be more understood as a digital commodity rather than shares in a startup,” he told Bloomberg at the sidelines of the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas. “Nobody has any particular strong influence.”Back is British, the holder of a doctorate in computer science and the chief executive of Blockstream, one of the oldest and best-capitalised infrastructure companies in the Bitcoin ecosystem. He is also one of the few known people whose work demonstrably influenced Bitcoin’s design. His 1997 paper on Hashcash — a proof-of-work algorithm intended to combat email spam — is cited in Satoshi’s 2008 whitepaper. He was, by his own account, working on the problem of digital scarcity, more than a decade before Bitcoin’s release.‘A sanguine transformation’The asset is now held in regulated exchange-traded funds by the world’s largest asset managers, packaged up by Nasdaq-listed firms gobbling up supply and debated on Wall Street as a candidate to hedge institutional portfolios.His view of the transformation is sanguine, markedly so, given how far Bitcoin has travelled from the niche, ideological project he helped seed. The ETFs and corporate treasury vehicles that have accumulated hundreds of billions of dollars of Bitcoin are, Back said, “effectively custodians on behalf of other investors.” Multiple custodians, regulatory oversight, the continued availability of self-custody for those who want it: the structure has, he says, “constraints and competitors” that prevent any single entity from capturing the network. (Bloomberg)
