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Adam Back

Adam Back (born July 1970) is a British cryptographer and cypherpunk. He is the CEO of Blockstream, which he co-founded in 2014. He invented Hashcash, which is used in the Bitcoin mining process.

Back was born in London, England, in July 1970.[1] He has a computer science PhD in distributed systems from the University of Exeter.[

Back is a pioneer of early digital asset research similarly as Wei Dai, David Chaum, and Hal Finney.[3][4] In 1997, Back invented Hashcash.[5] A similar system is used in bitcoin.[6][7][8]

He also implemented credlib,[9][better source needed][10][better source needed] a library that implements the credential systems of Stefan Brands and David Chaum.

He was the first to describe the "non-interactive forward secrecy"[11][12][13] security property for email and to observe that any identity based encryption scheme can be used to provide non-interactive forward secrecy.

He is also known for promoting the use of ultra-compact code with his 2-line[14] and 3-line RSA in Perl[15][16][17] signature file and non-exportable T-shirts[18][19] to protest cryptography export regulations.[20]

Back was one of the first two people to receive an email from Satoshi Nakamoto.[21][2] In 2016, the Financial Times cited Back as a potential Nakamoto candidate, along with Nick Szabo and Hal Finney.[22] In 2020, a YouTube channel called BarelySociable claimed that Back was Nakamoto. Back denied this.[2] Craig Wright had sued Back for stating that Wright was not Nakamoto, with Wright subsequently dropping the suit.[2]

Back has promoted the use of satellites and mesh networks to broadcast and receive bitcoin transactions, as a backup for the traditional internet.[23]
On 3 October 2016, Back was appointed as CEO of Blockstream.[24]