Bitcoin Was Discovered, Not Invented: Adam Back on Why We’re All Satoshi, Cypherpunks & Digital Gold

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]I'm going to bring to the stage Gareth Jenkinson, who's head of multimedia at The Block. Gareth, first of all, great to see you again. How are you doing?

[00:00:09]Thanks so much for having me and congrats on the live stream. It's it's been three very successful hours. I've been listening to all the speakers and yeah, particularly enjoyed the conversation between CZ and Chamath and I was I was taking notes here in the background.

[00:00:25]Yeah, I'm glad you enjoyed it. There was a lot of alpha over the past 3 hours. I think this is the final hour and and the highlight session. So thank you so much for joining us. I know we have our special guest joining in just a moment.

[00:00:35]Before we get into it, Gareth, just a really quick summary. I know you've been really busy. I can see from LinkedIn and X, you've been traveling around hitting a lot of the crypto conferences.

[00:00:44]Obviously, this is online. So we're streaming to around 86 different countries at the moment.

[00:00:49]And I'm curious to ask from the kind of sentiment on the ground at some of the crypto conferences that you're going to for for those of us that don't get away from our desks much, how's everything been? What kind of trends are you noticing? Is there any kind of conversations that you're having at the IRL events that you can share with us here Finance Online?

[00:01:05]Yeah, sure. I'm yeah, I've been on the road a little bit. I started off my kind of spring/summer in Can for ECC.

[00:01:14]And a few weeks ago, I was at Paris Blockchain Week. That's where I caught up with with Adam back in in real life most recently.

[00:01:21]And then I was in Miami last week for Consensus, which was really great. To be honest with you, I I definitely got the feeling that we're in a bear market but but not in a bad way.

[00:01:33]I've been in the industry as a journalist since 2017 and um you typically kind of see a lot of the fluff and the frost disappear from the industry and people that are like actually building products and services that that have meaning remain and and are are visible in real life and online.

[00:01:53]It was very much the case and yeah, I I last week um in Consensus, uh, in Miami was was really great, as well. I had some some fantastic conversations with lots of different, uh, industry leaders. And, yeah, the the event was well, uh, attended, as well. And I do get the feeling from all of these conferences that TradFi has kind of really arrived in our our industry. And I don't want to say taken over, but definitely the majority of people in the room seem to be, you know, wearing suits and and from a corporate environment, which is uh good and bad, depending on on how you look at it. I think if you if you chat to someone like Adam, who I will be in a few minutes time, and, uh, you know, you want to talk about the Cypherpunk roots of our industry, maybe we're kind of straying away from that. But I also think that this was the inevitable outcome that a lot of people were calling for, that we start using more decentralized tools and services to, uh, conduct finance and and share information on the internet. And that's the point at which we're arriving. And, um, the traditional kind of finance system and conventional business is catching up with us. They're clued up.

[00:02:58]They know what's happening. And they're in the room with us now. So that's my my general two cents on what's been going on. And I'm I'm very bullish. I'm I'm still very excited to be a part of the industry and part of the storytelling.

[00:03:09]Um, and, uh, yeah, that despite the markets being kind of down, uh, I'm very optimistic.

[00:03:17]Well, thank you for hosting so many conversations around the space. I know a lot of people get educated and informed from your content. So with that in mind, I'm not going to take up any more of your time. I'm going to leave the stage and bring the special guest, Adam Back, uh, and let you both take away the conversation. So Gareth, thank you so much for joining. Adam, thank you for joining. And I'll hand it over to you, Gareth and Adam.

[00:03:38]Perfect. Thank you. Uh, for those of you that that that don't know, of course we're joined by Adam Back. Uh, he's the founder and CEO of Blockstream. And of course, the inventor of Hashcash. Uh, he was cited in Bitcoin's white paper. Uh, and he was one of the the uh, early figures in our industry that actually, you know, um uh traded messages online with Satoshi. Adam, it's good to catch up with you virtually this time. Uh we were we were together in person in Paris a few weeks ago, and and for anyone that's looking for uh more information on that, you can catch our full interview on The Block's platform's YouTube X. You can you can find that interview. But first things first, how are you?

[00:04:14]Uh yeah, good as usual. Always uh a fun time in Bitcoin. What's going on?

[00:04:20]Yeah, definitely. I I I know you also uh crawling around Miami last week for Consensus and probably just as busy as I am. It's It's great to be seeing you out and about and and really um leading from the front when it when it comes to representing the Bitcoin industry as someone who knows it as intimately as you do. Uh when they were setting up the, you know, the uh agenda for this talk, the the title was why we're all Satoshi and what's next for Bitcoin, and um we've had some great conversations over the years, and I want to take you back uh to the early days um of Bitcoin's development. Uh you're one of a handful of people that are cited in the Bitcoin white paper. Um I've never asked you this before. Can you take us back to the the first sort of interactions you had with Satoshi and the the conversations, the short conversations you had over messaging, um and and what he kind of asked you about before he actually published the Bitcoin white paper?

[00:05:11]Yeah, so I mean actually I eventually released the emails to the COPA trial where >> [clears throat] >> you know, where where the the story is we're all Satoshi and some people add except for Craig Wright because he's the infamous uh kind of instigator behind that trial where COPA ultimately financed uh the defense and prevailed in this case.

[00:05:37]Um so so the people can look at the emails if you search for COPA and my name and email Satoshi or something like that.

[00:05:45]This was in August 2008, so a few months before Satoshi published the first white paper, you know, the white paper draft publicly. He sent me um a link to an early draft of the paper, I guess, ultimately. And um was initially just asking about the citation. You know, is this the right way to cite Hashcash? And I was like, cuz it's it's not you know, it's not published in a journal. It's kind of tech report that I wrote and put on my website, right? Um and so I said, "Sure, that's that looks good. Uh but you should have a look at B-money because it sounds very related to what you're talking about." It seemed like he didn't know about B-money. It's a little bit ambiguous, but generally looked like it. And he immediately you know, Wei Dai released the email exchanges that he had with Satoshi.

[00:06:37]And Satoshi turned around like the same day, next day, emailed Wei Dai and asked him, you know, what's the correct citation for B-money? So, you know, he must have looked at it and decided this is worth citing, added to the citations, and did the same thing to Wei Dai, say, you know, what's the correct way to cite this?

[00:06:53]And uh you know, some people have said things like, "Oh, Wei Dai helped uh Satoshi with B-money." And sorry, with with Bitcoin. And Wei stepped into that conversation and said, "No, he didn't even seem to know about B-money, so I clearly didn't I So and then on the forums, of course, uh it turns out that Satoshi later said on the BitcoinTalk forums, maybe some other places, all all of my exchanges were emails, by the way.

[00:07:17]There's no interactive chat with Satoshi. Um and so uh >> [clears throat] >> you know, at a later time, Satoshi posted on the BitcoinTalk forum. I was kind of, you know, focused on all that startup stuff at the time, so I caught up with this in 2013 or 2012, something like that.

[00:07:37]That uh he had to implement Bitcoin before he wrote the paper. And as far as we can tell I was the first person to receive an email from him.

[00:07:45]And and somewhere else he said it took him 18 months, right? So, you know, that would be starting in what, January-ish 2007.

[00:07:57]Implement it, presumably it took a little while to write the paper, email me the paper, he's starting to, you know, fill in the citations, get initial feedback from people.

[00:08:07]And um yeah, so that's that's the context communicate and it can it continue.

[00:08:11]There's a few more, you know, uh I sent him another citation for some other kind of hash-based electronic cash system by Rivest and and some other cryptographers, um called Micromint.

[00:08:25]And then he sent me you know, download link, you know, you might want to try it out. I'm about to start the network, uh >> [clears throat] >> which I don't unfortunately didn't do, or I might have some uh you know, uh first day block coins, uh which I'm not sure. I mean, there are clearly a lot of miners in the first year of Bitcoin because, you know, even if you accept the the maximum estimate from the Satoshi pattern, there were 2.5 million coins roughly mined in 2009. Presumably the Satoshi pattern continues after that. And I mean, that's just a million and a half, but it's not him, so there's lots of early people who mined. Dustin Trammell is somebody who's spoken up about that. It's interesting to listen to his uh podcast discussion about the experience before he got bored and like went away and then came back some years later and found his you know, dug up his wallet.

[00:09:12]Yeah. Yeah, I I also I I went in uh a bit of a rabbit hole on the Satoshi pattern quite a few years ago and I wrote a feature for uh CoinTelegraph magazine, which which is still live on CoinTelegraph magazine if if anyone's interested in in reading that and had a long discussion with uh Sergio uh Lerner about, you know, his his kind of his work to try and identify the pattern.

[00:09:33]And it just super interesting, you know, and and that's actually uh for those that don't know, that's that's how we actually figured out an estimate of of how many, you know, Bitcoin actually belong to Satoshi by sort of identifying a pattern in the way that he he hashed when he was mining to uh figure out how many coins he'd actually mined himself.

[00:09:52]Um uh Adam, I wanted to ask you a little bit about those conversations. Did you Did you realize that Satoshi was going to use um your your proof-of-work approach that you implemented in hashcash in the early conversations that you had? I mean, had he intimated that intimated to you that, "Hey, I I think that this is the best way to do this?"

[00:10:14]Well, I mean, obviously, uh you know, it became evident that he'd already used it. I actually implemented the system.

[00:10:20]He'd used hashcash, uh increased the precision on it a bit, which is something I contemplated before, but not you know, you didn't need that kind of fine level of precision for the for the previous use cases. It was okay that the difficulty would adjust by a factor of two.

[00:10:34]Um and so yeah, that was actually the topic of his initial email, which is, "I'm using hashcash. Is this the correct way to size it?" And, you know, I learned enough about Bitcoin um to understand that he'd solved some problems because, you know, the idea of using hashcash to try and build a decentralized e-cash is not new.

[00:10:55]That was you know, there was already discussion of how to make a decentralized e-cash before I introduced hashcash. And one of the stumbling blocks, you know, the reason people were trying to make a decentralized e-cash is that single centralized system failed.

[00:11:10]And the disappointing object lesson is, "Centralized systems are a weak point.

[00:11:14]We need to figure out how to decentralize this and then build a new system and deploy it."

[00:11:19]And so when I introduced hashcash initially as a kind of postage stamp uh technology for anti-spam and anti-denial-of-service, it seemed to occur to, you know, lots of people, like a dozen people or something on the discussion list I posted on, which was cypherpunks list, within the first few days of posting it. They're like, "Oh, you know, the problem with decentralized e-cash in the past was a peer-to-peer protocol can't have a bank account, right?"

[00:11:48]But now with this proof of work concept, hey, we could mine the coins. And I was participating in these conversations and um you know, there's there are people that have done uh a lot of reading and cataloging these early conversations that sound somewhat Bitcoin similar, but they're missing some components of design that Satoshi picked out, basically. So, we tried and we didn't quite make it, but you know, you can see the conversations in 1997 and during the month after the Hashcash paper.

[00:12:18]And you can see Wei Dai posting about b-money about a year later.

[00:12:22]And somewhere in there um Nick Szabo also posted about Bitgold, but I think that was another list, so I think might not personally have noticed seeing that until a bit later.

[00:12:32]So, you know, and some people say, "Well, why didn't Satoshi say um Bitgold?" That was my fault because I should really have remembered and pointed out, "Look at b-money and Bitgold because they're sort of relatively similar concepts." But they're all using Hashcash in a proposed way to do this. But you know, there were some 1997 uh discussions that sound similar as well. And John Carreyrou in his long article had, you know, spotted some of the similarities in those even earlier discussions before b-money.

[00:13:04]And that seems to be, you know, the case. And of course, Aaron van Wirdum wrote his book, The Genesis Book, and there's a chapter on the pre-Bitcoin similar ideas like proof of work-related electronic cash.

[00:13:16]And RPOW by Hal Finney is another one that's in 2004. So, there's, you know, initial discussions in 1997, same year as Hashcash, to slightly more concrete proposals in 1988 B-money at Bit Gold, Wei Dai and Nick Szabo, and then by 2004 Hal Finney implemented a different twist, also proof-of-work based, but centralized, um however, using trustworthy computing, which was new at that time.

[00:13:42]Yeah. Look, I think if if Satoshi had referenced everyone, that would have been a very long reference list. So, uh he he probably had to try and keep it as short as possible. Um you mentioned the new >> the guy here.

[00:13:54]>> Yeah, I mean, I think he just um it seemed like he would he somehow he'd, you know, I don't know how he arrived at the idea, right? But, he didn't seem to be aware of B-money. I think Bit Gold was a little bit harder to find.

[00:14:07]And B-money itself was only, you know, posted on a webpage.

[00:14:11]Brief discussion on the few cryptography lists, right? So, it'd be pretty easy to miss. So, you know, that's fair enough.

[00:14:17]But, a lot of people knew about proof-of-work because spam was a hot topic and it kind of is is an ongoing nuisance, but now we have more heuristic spam control features, which kind of work, plus or minus. So, anyway, it's uh interesting to see um that he basically adapted the citations because I sent him something and I didn't send him the other things and he didn't cite them. So, there we go.

[00:14:43]Well, I I also I just just to tack onto that, I find it amazing that uh he designed the protocol that he did he did not knowing about these earlier works in sort of, you know, decentralized money, which which says something about the innovation of Bitcoin in of itself is that it didn't need to take all the best and all the failings of all the other, you know, implementations of of decentralized money in building what he built in Bitcoin. And maybe it did take a a fresh mind that wasn't I don't want to say tainted, but influenced by all the other projects that had tried to do it.

[00:15:17]Yeah, I mean, you know, of course, people look at Bitcoin as a design and it's elegant and you can understand it at different levels.

[00:15:27]And so when you see something and you can understand it, some people's intuition is, "Oh, I could have done that." But you know, we tried a lot of clever people tried in '95 to 2005 and didn't quite make it.

[00:15:39]But you know, on the other hand, to your point, you know, one of the debates is Bitcoin invented or discovered? I think the you know, sort of parallel track suggests it feels more like a discovery.

[00:15:51]And the other thing that makes it feel like a discovery is very mathematical, right?

[00:15:56]And uh if you try to modify the design, which I, you know, spent some time trying to figure out in 2013, it seems like if you change very much, it stops working. So it exists in a very narrow area of design space, which also may be partly explains why we didn't figure it out, you know, before the people involved before didn't quite figure out how to make it work.

[00:16:19]And I thought also we were looking at it slightly the wrong way, you know, the previous system, the centralized system that failed was a stable coin literally.

[00:16:25]You'd send a wire transfer and you know, that's why we're like, "Oh, it's a problem on it's peer-to-peer protocol, can't have a bank account."

[00:16:32]And so at least for some of the thought process was how do you make a proof-of-work based system price stable?

[00:16:40]And of course that makes it harder. So I think at least for me that was an ingredient in you know, not some some of the some of the one of one of the features that Satoshi introduced which is um just, you know, fix the mecha-engineered mathematical rate supply and let the market price it.

[00:16:57]But you know, I wouldn't say that's the case for everybody because I think some of the other people in that discussion were kind of gold bugs, right?

[00:17:03]So they probably like independent hard money as a concept, but I think it's quite common that you can part of the design challenge is asking the right question. And in in in when you see the solution, it looks obvious that is how it should be designed. But at the time, people are kind of fumbling around in an infinite search space trying to figure out by imagination where could there be a solution lurking or does it even exist, right?

[00:17:28]Yeah. Yeah, look, I think hindsight's always like pure you know, clear sight and uh like you say, you don't know until you figured something out. Um look, we we've spoken at length about the New York Times piece uh that claimed that you are Satoshi and I don't want to I don't want to uh you know, flog a dead horse cuz it's been spoken about so much in recent months and you've done so many press appearances, but uh my only question on that is do you think it actually matters if if we know who Satoshi is and and do we ever get an answer to that question?

[00:17:59]And could it be Quantum that does that before we get into the Quantum stuff?

[00:18:02]Yeah, I mean I think it's actually beneficial for Bitcoin that Satoshi stopped participating in the forums and it it remains a mystery. So, he he stopped participating sometime in 2011. So, I only you know, got more actively involved in 2013 and went back and read all of his old posts to try and like, you know, glean more information or insights you could about how Bitcoin worked and why.

[00:18:24]As many other people do when they go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, right? Um And so, I think it actually helps Bitcoin be viewed as a discovery as a kind of bearer of money gold-like. Gold was also presumably discovered by some Neolithic humans, right?

[00:18:44]And it's a actually a Neolithic era shiny rock, but it it's remarkably resilient, right?

[00:18:50]So, I think Bitcoin, like a lot of things that go from the analog to the digital, when you go into the digital, you can design a better, more robust version of the analog things. So, I think digital gold is ultimately the best simple way to explain Bitcoin.

[00:19:04]So, I think yeah, it's it's good that we don't know. I suspect we won't know because a lot of people looked at the digital footprints from 2009 to 2011 from when Satoshi was, you know, posting on forums and emailing and and didn't figure anything out, nothing definitive, right? So, it's a very cold trail and what, you know, people are writing about more recently is sort of speculative backfilling, you know, like this person, you know, Hal Finney did this, Adam did that, other people Wei Dai did this.

[00:19:38]What do they know, you know, are they C++ programmers, do they what's falling do they have, what time zone were they in? It's it's all like speculative and and it's quite possible, probable even, in my opinion, that it's somebody that isn't even on the sort of recognizable list of potential candidates because there are lots of clever people in the world, some of who we don't have a a very chatty online footprint. And, you know, during this period, like 1997, I was a very active online presence. I was very fascinated with, you know, privacy tech and electronic cash and the cypherpunks mission. I still am, you know.

[00:20:18]And the um So, but you know, there are other people who are not so talkative online. Um I you know, I had free time on my hands, I was a post-doc, so and not not some of some of some of the other cypherpunks were a bit older than me.

[00:20:36]Like Nick Szabo is older and so on and I think they were already working in industry for like 5 or 10 years.

[00:20:41]Yeah. Look, um let's talk a little bit about the quantum threat and and just for the audience here, those that might not understand what the quantum threat is to Bitcoin, it is it is it really the point at which we reach quantum computers getting good enough to break ECDSA signatures and steal Satoshi's coins, is that really what everyone's worried about?

[00:21:04]Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure exactly which physicist first proposed it. I think Richard Feynman and is famous for most physics guy.

[00:21:14]Contemplate the idea. It's It's something that's been around for a while. I first learned about the you know, the mathematical concepts and the algorithmic capabilities of a quantum computer. So, you've got different types of hardware. You know, you've got CPU with a single core. Now, you have GPUs with hundreds or thousands of cores. That changes the game. You've got distributed systems where you've got, you know, thousands of cores connected by high-speed interconnection.

[00:21:39]You've got different computer architectures.

[00:21:42]But, they're all what's called von Neumann machines. And quantum computers is using some quantum physics effects to hypothe- to hypothesize that we could actually have a type of computing that could be faster than a von Neumann machine machine in a systematic way exploiting some as- some aspect of quantum physics with entanglement where it could search a search space. They're particularly good for search problems.

[00:22:05]Solving parallel in multiple universes would be one way to interpret that or some kind of quantum effects. Sounds very science fiction, but you know, some of these effects have been like theoretically and empirically proven to be to be case.

[00:22:19]But, nevertheless, it's extremely challenging to actually achieve a large-scale system that retains a quantum effects. Quantum effects tend to disappear rapidly when they interact when they're observed. And you know, so the the hardware research has been going on since I went to the I lived in Montreal back in the early 2000s.

[00:22:38]And there were some of the top sort of mathematics researchers looking at quantum computing at the universities there. And so, I went to some masters courses on explaining the mathematics. And you know, so since then, I was kind of loosely tracking how's the quantum hardware progressing.

[00:22:54]And it's been fairly linear, you know?

[00:22:55]It's been 25 years since something like that since I sat in that course.

[00:23:00]And you know, every year or two, there'd be another bit and it'd be like six bits, seven bits, eight bits. And I suppose that's that's just one aspect of it. There are many complicated and subtle aspects. So, at this point in time, there are multiple candidate architectures. You can build it out of trapped ions, you can build it out of this, you can build it out of that. And each of those candidate architectures does better or worse on some criteria, but there's no kind of combined QC architecture that actually gets anywhere viable yet.

[00:23:33]So, to my mind, we are still in the kind of early research phase. Sort of like before the first silicon chip, the first ASIC, the first CPU, where previous to that, and I think this is like 85 years ago or something, they had uh a a vacuum tube. So, like a large glass tube that was could behave like a transistor. And they would create on a tabletop kind of massive circuit that could do very minimal things. So, it feels kind of that's roughly where we are in the quantum.

[00:24:05]So, when they arrive at at whatever the architecture is that, assuming it exists, that can scale, then we're going to find out if it's scalable in practice. Because, you know, some of the uh issues with scaling, you know, keeping more bits entangled create knock-on problems. You know, it it creates more resources to do error correction.

[00:24:27]They become less stable, the error builds up faster.

[00:24:30]Or they decohere too fast too quickly.

[00:24:33]You know, a a classical computer doesn't sort of spontaneously fail after 100 microseconds, where currently they do for the most part. Now, if you tell somebody from the hardware side of it, oh, the the coherence time is 100 milliseconds, sorry, 100 microseconds, and the clock rate is roughly this, so that's why they can only factorize the number 15 into 3 * 5 because it will decohere before they complete.

[00:24:57]And they will say, "Oh, no, no, there's there's a system which has more uh more coherence time." But if you go to look at which architecture was that?

[00:25:04]Okay, but it has some other defect. So, there's you know, you can because research is all about reaching a new target in something, right? So, to get a new target, you have to focus on that and you might lose other things.

[00:25:19]Now, eventually we might get to uh as they I I saw some of the other com- commentators said that you know, when we get an architecture that functions at some level and they were able to incrementally approve a couple times, that's time to pay attention. I suspect that's in the next decade at least before we even get to that benchmark.

[00:25:41]So, you know, it's it's a real physics effects, the ultimate practical buildability of this, to me it seems like an open question.

[00:25:52]But the simple way forward is to do what Blockstream research and other uh people in the Bitcoin protocol and and development space have have been doing for the last year is to work on a concrete post-quantum signature proposal for Bitcoin. So, in 2020 and 2021, Bitcoin added Schnorr signatures.

[00:26:14]I believe I was the first person to propose and like uh chase people to say this is a good idea, we should do it in 2013. So, it took a took a little while to get there.

[00:26:23]>> [laughter] >> But Blockstream has you know, did a lot of the active research on how to do Schnorr signatures, how to do music, and you know, is one of the active contributors to libsecp256k1 library which Bitcoin uses and actually most other cryptos just copy it. So, I think ultimately you know, Bitcoin will figure out what is a good trade-off and the other coins will copy whatever Bitcoin does.

[00:26:48]And there is a you know, a straightforward path to becoming post-quantum secure or post-quantum ready much faster than the hardware can get there. You know, it's much faster and easier to do with software research.

[00:27:00]We know roughly what to do. There's a NIST standard which is a year and a half old at this point.

[00:27:06]We've uh you know Janus Nick put out a proposal with our research team on Up Shrinks which is a So, Shrinks is a a signature scheme that's an optimized version of the NIST standard and we've implemented that in Liquid, a Bitcoin layer two developed by Blockstream.

[00:27:24]Um and you know, lots of other researchers are looking at it. So, but however, if you look at the media it looks like quantum is coming.

[00:27:34]The sky is falling.

[00:27:36]But that is because negative news sells and people building things and building solutions get ignored.

[00:27:44]The reality is squarely the other way around.

[00:27:47]Yeah. No, exactly. And I I mean like we're a bit short on time, but if anyone's interested in in exploring this conversation further, Adam and I spoke about this at length at Paris Blockchain Week as well. So, you can you can find that interview and I I I guess the TLDR there is the risk is way further down the line and possible. The Bitcoin ecosystem is working very hard at, you know, producing quantum secure signatures and and solutions that that should be adopted by by the ecosystem.

[00:28:15]And I I think we can all say that we're we're pretty confident that the the rate of change should be well before the threat becomes very real. But Adam, I just want to say thank you so much for your time. I I don't want to hold up the stream, although I'm sure most people would sit here listening to us speak for another half an hour. There are other people on the program, but it's great to catch up with you. And thanks to the Binance team for for having us online in this event.

[00:28:40]Yeah, great talking with you.