Adam Back | Bitcoin's origins, the Satoshi mystery & why quantum won't kill it

Hashcash.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah, so Hashcash, that was in 1997, and there were discussions on the Cypherpunks mailing list from sort of probably '95 to 2005 era, trying to work out how to make a decentralized electronic cash system.

'Cause there was a popular centralized one that failed, and, you know, the Cypherpunks, uh, who were interested in, like, designing and implementing things to enable that, took the lesson that why did it fail? Well, it failed because it was centralized, so how could you make a decentralized electronic cash? So you can see immediately you have a problem because the system that failed was a stable coin type idea, and so you needed a bank account, and a peer-to-peer protocol, which is how you'd make it decentralized, can't have a bank account, so you're stuck, right? And so when I proposed Hashcash proof of work for kind of postage stamps for anti-spam, immediately became an idea that, well, wait a minute, you could use that to mine the coins, and then you don't need a bank account, and then people could trade them, and then there would be a value.

So that was the-

Proof of work is brilliant.

It, it does...

Well, I mean, it, it's, uh, it's actually sparked, um, a lot of kind of philosophical thoughts over the years, right? Where people talk about Bitcoin as a savings technology, increasing their time preference, so they think longer term because they have a, you know, a form of savings that can, you know, be very positive.

A don't get poor slowly scheme.

Yeah.

Right.

So speaking of your cypherpunk credentials, um, where in the Bitcoin world can we still see the cypherpunk spirit? Just cutting to the present quickly, I mean, you run a company in the space whose tailwinds are arguably BlackRock adoption.

Um, but at the same time, you have always been committed to this being a technology that enables exit from the system.

How do you reconcile those things?

Well, I think Bitcoin is both, and so you can think about, um, you know, what it takes for an individual to adopt Bitcoin is to be easy enough to use.

So ease of use, availability of clear instructions, easy-to-use software.

Uh, we-- So we manufacture, uh, hardware wallets, we do software wallets, and so, you know, that's on the consumer side.

And we, uh, at Blockstream, we also do some protocol work and try to improve privacy in, in Bitcoin and Bitcoin layer two.

But philosophically, how do you reconcile those two parts of your identity?

Yeah.

So I mean, you know, I think a lot of people have not traded stocks or bought an IPO before they got into-- interested in Bitcoin.

So the first thing they traded or first thing they bought a-as a, as an investment was Bitcoin.

But the cypherpunks were actually, uh, free market advocates.

So anarcho-capitalists, they would call themselves.