Adam Back on Satoshi Emails, Privacy Concerns and Bitcoin's Early Days

Eleven years after Bitcoin's release, Cointelegraph caught up with Adam Back to discuss the early years of Bitcoin, his emails with Satoshi Nakamoto, privacy and much more.

Back also dismissed the idea that he is the father of Bitcoin and said he didn't help Satoshi create the world's first cryptocurrency, despite confirming he was probably the first person Satoshi talked to about Bitcoin when he sent an email to Back introducing his idea.

"There was also my 1997 contribution of Hashcash as well as many later proof-of-work articles - dozens of them after Hashcash and before Bitcoin, and a few others after Bitcoin launched. I mentioned a few in my 2002 paper about Hashcash and some earlier proof-of-work papers like Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor's and even earlier related papers. We can't forget that there was also Hal Finney's reusable proofs-of-work, or RPoW, that predates Bitcoin from 2004."There were also anonymous people looking to create virtual money like MagicMoney from Product Cipher and other privacy tools like Heinry Hastur's 'pgp stealth,' which I later took over maintenance of.

"The questions at that time were: Will he start this? What are the principles? I suggested Satoshi should look into B-Money, which he didn't seem to know about at that time, and this is how I think B-Money was added to the paper."There were a few more emails, and I also sent Satoshi Ron Rivest's 1996 paper on MicroMint, which extracts k-way hash collisions instead of partial pre-images used by Bitcoin.

Bitcoin software"I didn't help to create Bitcoin, I didn't program anything nor participate in any programming task.

"Hal Finney could have reviewed the early Bitcoin code. I have never met Hal in person, but I really liked his inventiveness and enjoyed discussing topics on the cypherpunks list or in email with him. If 'cypherpunks write code,' Hal was a code writer, for sure."There has been some speculation about who may have helped Satoshi review the Bitcoin code prior to release because of the email that he sent to the list in November 2018.

Bitcoin released with privacy issues"Unlike Hal Finney and others, although Satoshi sent me the software before the official release, I didn't start running it at the very beginning.

Shortly after its release, Hal tried using Bitcoin and wrote a summary of how it worked on the mailing list, and after that I went back to analyzing Bitcoin.

"It seemed to me that Bitcoin had serious privacy limitations compared with Chaum's 1981 protocol."I am interested in privacy tech, encryption and protocols, so I was interested in improving Bitcoin's privacy and fungibility.

"Gradually, Bitcoin was gaining momentum and was no longer just a proposal but a real decentralized digital money actually working. To solve the privacy issues not implemented in Bitcoin, we then proposed the creation of sidechains such as Liquid in 2013 to help features be implemented, to gain experience and confidence with them, and to validate tradeoffs. And later I founded Blockstream with Greg Maxwell, Pieter Wuille and others to develop that technology and make it end-to-end usable."