11 years afterward Bitcoin's release, Cointelegraph defenseless upwardly with Adam Back to hash out the early years of Bitcoin, his emails with Satoshi Nakamoto, privacy and much more.

The Blockstream CEO, who spoke to Cointelegraph at the Latin American crypto event LaBitconf in Uruguay, is a developer and cryptographer known for inventing Hashcash, a predecessor of the proof-of-work organization used past Bitcoin.

Back also dismissed the idea that he is the male parent of Bitcoin and said he didn't assistance Satoshi create the globe'due south start cryptocurrency, despite confirming he was probably the get-go person Satoshi talked to about Bitcoin when he sent an email to Back introducing his idea.

Cypherpunks

"There were many other things that paved the way for Bitcoin, like digital money experiments driven past cypherpunk ideals. In the 1990s, when the movement really started, I was in Europe, so I but attended i of these San Francisco Bay area in-person cypherpunk meetings.

"Nevertheless, the cypherpunks not only discussed east-cash only many other privacy-related topics. At that time, there was not but The Cryptography Mailing list — where Nakamoto offset published — merely many other lists where Nick Szabo, Wei Dai, Hal Finney and others frequently talked about e-cash. Some were physically in the Bay Area — I think Szabo, for example, may accept attended the cypherpunks' contiguous meetings in the Bay Area along with Cypherpunks mailing list co-founders Eric Hughes, John Gimore and the late Timothy May.

"Back in 1981, David Chaum had already created the foundation for anonymous communication, and in 1983, he launched bullheaded signature schemes. Privacy, anonymity, individual freedom and digital control were hot topics for cypherpunks, along with math and programming."

E-cash

"Digital money was also a hot topic, and information technology was discussed on the Cypherpunks list and other lists like Coderpunks, Cryptography and Bluesky."

Adam Back was one of the near active posters on the Cypherpunks list, with over 700 published posts.

"In that location was a lot of debate near creating digital coin. Besides Chaum's most famous DigiCash, B-Money (developed by Wei) and Scrap-Gold (developed by Szabo), there are many other obscure papers on the subject area, and I sent Satoshi references to a couple of them related to proof-of-work in 2008.

"At that time, in 1998, Wei and Szabo were already discussing their ideas most digital money and sharing their proposals on B-Money and Fleck-Gold among themselves and other participants on these lists.

"In that location was as well my 1997 contribution of Hashcash also as many later on proof-of-work articles — dozens of them after Hashcash and earlier Bitcoin, and a few others after Bitcoin launched. I mentioned a few in my 2002 paper about Hashcash and some before proof-of-piece of work papers like Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor'southward and even before related papers. We tin't forget that in that location was also Hal Finney'south reusable proofs-of-piece of work, or RPoW, that predates Bitcoin from 2004.

"There were too anonymous people looking to create virtual coin like MagicMoney from Product Nada and other privacy tools similar Heinry Hastur's 'pgp stealth,' which I after took over maintenance of.

"So, if he was on the Cypherpunks listing, Satoshi wouldn't be the simply 'anonymous' on these lists nor even the but one trying to launch a paper most virtual money. In that location were many anonymous and pseudonymous people discussing topics on the Cypherpunk lists, including the due east-cash topic.

"Myself, Finney and Peter Todd, who was just 15 back then in 2001, were discussing Hashcash and digital coin as well on the Bluesky list, with Todd as well interested in creating decentralized digital coin."

The "kickoff" virtual coin transaction

"Decentralized. This is maybe the main word about Bitcoin arising from the proposals that came earlier it.

"Chaum had launched the outset version of a 'digital coin' back in 1989. And some of us on the Cypherpunk lists tried to bootstrap value into Chaum'southward DigiCash demo server, where it was possible to go coins by e-mail and was promised not to issue more than than 1 meg units of it.

"On the demo server, I even sold some t-shirts (exported RSA t-shirts) and all of usa who were using the DigiCash demo thought that if enough people did that it could showtime up with a stable value as long as information technology was simply 1 million coins.

"Unfortunately, DigiCash went broke during this experiment, and the double-spend centralized database was also a problem — considering if you had coins, it was impossible to prove to anyone if they were spent later they were gone.

"The lesson learned from DigiCash was that we needed a decentralized, peer-to-peer approach, and that was function of the discussion about Hashcash, B-Money, Bit-Gold, RPoW, and other bootstrapping ideas.

"Yous had to create digital money in a decentralized way, without a bank interface, without permission or partnership with a bank."

Hashcash

"This is why the concept of Hashcash and mining was attractive — as some people could mine information technology to create coins, and others could buy and sell them in the decentralized secondary market considering at that place was no centralized database nor bank partnership needed.

"There were also gaps in B-Money and Bit-Gold, so they were non fully complete projects or had players and man markets fulfilling functions that Bitcoin is able to automate inside the protocol.

"Hashcash was widely reported at the time in computer magazines and online publications because spam was an increasingly hot topic and there was a hassle with the arms race for which some It people and IETF groups were trying to discover solutions.

"And then, Satoshi could have learned about Hashcash without ever debating anything in the cypherpunk groups."

Emails with Satoshi

"In August (or July) 2008, I received an email from Satoshi Nakamoto with an e-cash white paper (there was no name 'Bitcoin' yet) and it seemed interesting.

"The questions at that fourth dimension were: Will he start this? What are the principles? I suggested Satoshi should look into B-Coin, which he didn't seem to know about at that time, and this is how I recollect B-Money was added to the newspaper.

"There were a few more emails, and I besides sent Satoshi Ron Rivest's 1996 paper on MicroMint, which extracts g-style hash collisions instead of partial pre-images used by Bitcoin. Information technology is a fleck centralized, merely interesting.

Probably non so many people were aware of the MicroMint newspaper and even less and then the B-Money write-up digital currency proposal. Although I was aware of Szabo's piece of work, I happened to not transport him a reference to Flake-Gold."

Bitcoin software

"I didn't help to create Bitcoin, I didn't program annihilation nor participate in whatever programming task. Effectually the fourth dimension the software came out, Satoshi sent it to me, but I didn't help him with that.

"Hal Finney could have reviewed the early Bitcoin code. I have never met Hal in person, simply I really liked his inventiveness and enjoyed discussing topics on the cypherpunks list or in electronic mail 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 listing in November 2008. Just it seems that Satoshi programmed Bitcoin first before writing the paper and probably he, himself, made several revisions to the lawmaking, and later others — like Hal, for case — may have helped review comments or bug reports or doing minor bug fixes, but as when you write text and ask someone to review the grammer."

Source: https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/6/

Bitcoin released with privacy problems

"Different Hal Finney and others, although Satoshi sent me the software earlier the official release, I didn't start running it at the very commencement. Soon afterwards its release, Hal tried using Bitcoin and wrote a summary of how it worked on the mailing list, and later that I went dorsum to analyzing Bitcoin.

"Information technology seemed to me that Bitcoin had serious privacy limitations compared with Chaum'due south 1981 protocol.

"I am interested in privacy tech, encryption and protocols, so I was interested in improving Bitcoin's privacy and fungibility. So, I later proposed confidential transactions and Schnorr signatures and also some other ideas.

"Gradually, Bitcoin was gaining momentum and was no longer just a proposal simply a real decentralized digital money actually working. To solve the privacy problems not implemented in Bitcoin, we and then proposed the creation of sidechains such as Liquid in 2022 to assist features be implemented, to proceeds experience and confidence with them, and to validate tradeoffs. And later on I founded Blockstream with Greg Maxwell, Pieter Wuille and others to develop that technology and make it end-to-cease usable."

E-mail

Cointelegraph asked if we could meet the emails between Back and Satoshi, but Dorsum was hesitant. Instead, he referred us to a tweet he sent concluding year stating his belief that Satoshi's anonymity is "a Bitcoin feature" and that if he had any pieces of prove that could assistance deduce Satoshi'due south true identity he would "delete/shred them."

"I've never revealed my emails to Satoshi and possibly I never volition. Netiquette dictates non sharing emails without permission and I did not inquire if Satoshi would be okay revealing personal emails."