Dr. Adam Back: Bitcoin Has 'Undergone Enough Dramatic Changes' to Not Matter Who Satoshi Is

In this interview, Back discusses his early work on Bitcoin, the big use case for bitcoin right now as a store of value and how he reconciles that with his goal of making bitcoin a widespread payment system, and the biggest risks to Bitcoin or Blockstream.

Dr. Adam Back, cofounder and CEO of Blockstream, is a British cryptographer and computer scientist. He is best known for his 1997 invention of Hashcash, the proof-of-work system foundational to bitcoin mining. As CEO of Blockstream, Dr. Back plays a central role in developing infrastructure and scaling solutions shaping the future of finance on Bitcoin.

Key Blockstream innovations include the Liquid Network, Bitcoin’s first and leading sidechain, designed to enable faster, more confidential transactions, as well as the seamless issuance of digital assets, including stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs).

Back is widely known in the crypto community for having had communications with Satoshi Nakamoto before the pseudonymous bitcoin creator wrote his seminal white paper in 2008. In this discussion, we briefly cover some of his early work on Bitcoin. However, the majority of it relates to his work at Blockstream, which just completed a $210 million convertible note offering to create more functionality on top of Bitcoin.

Forbes: How did you first start working with Satoshi?

Adam Back: I was the first person to receive an email from Satoshi before it [Bitcoin] was launched. It wasn’t a very detailed conversation. I believe he had already developed the software, and the next thing he’d done was write the white paper describing how it worked. He was citing related work and asked for the correct way to cite Hashcash. The next thing I heard was him telling me he had published the white paper and wanted to know if I would download the source code for Bitcoin. That was around January 2009.

Forbes: Do you think at this point it matters if we find out who Satoshi is?

Back: I think it is mattering less and less because we’ve got a lot of years of history now of experiencing Bitcoin as a decentralized thing. I think it gets viewed more like a discovery because it’s decentralized and there’s no CEO or founder, unlike some of the other projects. Humanity discovered physical gold as a good type of money. Now we’ve discovered a better one: electronic digital gold. We’ve gone through enough dramatic changes, like the Blocksize Wars, where the market ultimately prevailed, that it would not matter much if Satoshi returns. That is quite a positive outcome if you think about it because the market is a proxy for the user’s wishes regarding electronic cash.

Forbes: Let’s turn to Blockstream. The big use case for bitcoin right now is as a store of value. How do you reconcile that with your goal of making bitcoin a widespread payment system?

Back: We have a bit of a foot in two camps because we have one of the major implementations of Lightning, which is all about scalability and retail payments. Then we’ve got Liquid, which is more about trustless trades, smart contracts, assets, stablecoins and securities.

While I have a computer science background, back in the mid-nineties, I was a fairly avid day trader and investor with my savings. I was interested to see what Bitcoin technology, like the blockchain, could do to improve the trading infrastructure.

That dates back to events such as the Mt. Gox failure because you’re finding that you should have a piece of technology that allows you to do atomic swaps without giving up custody. In practice, everybody was giving custody to an exchange, meaning you need to trust somebody else. It was the same story with FTX.

Liquid is doing multiple things. It’s also been used for stablecoins and retail payments. There’s a new phenomenon: a crossover Lightning wallet. There are three or four of them now. They look like a Lightning wallet, but actually, they are a Liquid wallet, and when you want to make a payment, they use a trustless swap to exchange Liquid bitcoin for Lightning or vice versa. So all your storage is done on Liquid.

We built a block explorer for Liquid, and there is now an ecosystem of companies around Liquid, kind of like what exists around Lightning. One startup called SideSwap offers a trustless central order book, but you can place limit orders along the way. We also made our own hardware wallet to innovate a bit faster. You approve the trade right on your hardware wallet. That’s pretty innovative and exciting because you haven’t given up custody.

Regarding the store of value question, people have been thinking about inflation since Covid, and generally speaking, our currencies don’t feel too stable from a short-term perspective. But I think what you’ve seen is growth in emerging markets. Remember that about 50% of the world’s working population is the informal economy. They get paid in cash, there’s no paperwork, and they don’t have any government ID. Those people don’t have direct access to the global economy. That’s pretty interesting and supports the transactional use case because as much as