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

**Amanda Cassatt** (0:00)
You're not Satoshi, right?

**Adam Back** (0:01)
That's right.

**Amanda Cassatt** (0:02)
But The New York Times thinks you are. Why?

**Adam Back** (0:04)
People are fascinated by the backstory of who Satoshi is, because it's such a unique situation and the mystery around its beginnings. In the absence of information, people write their own stories. I got to thinking, wait a minute, the Bitcoiners might think it's me, so that's still the case.

**Amanda Cassatt** (0:22)
Because you were the first person Satoshi reached out to about it, so you see how they got this idea. Is it annoying to have all these people think you're Satoshi? Does it cause kind of a bother?

**Adam Back** (0:31)
I mean, actually in 2013, when I got more actively interested in Bitcoin, I was just kind of waiting to see, would Bitcoin get adoption? And I saw a few things in the news and realized, okay, it's happening, right?

**Amanda Cassatt** (0:46)
I'm Amanda Cassatt and you're watching Endgame. Would you say you're still a crypto-anarchist?

**Adam Back** (0:51)
Oh, yeah, 100%. If I read some of my sort of mid-90s discussion posts, I could have written them yesterday. It looks exactly the same. As institutions and pension funds and governments got involved in Bitcoin, it changed them rather than them changing Bitcoin.

**Amanda Cassatt** (1:11)
Adam, I'm so glad you can be here.

**Adam Back** (1:13)
Well, thanks for having me on.

**Amanda Cassatt** (1:15)
So we'll start with, you're not Satoshi, right?

**Adam Back** (1:19)
That's right.

**Amanda Cassatt** (1:20)
But The New York Times thinks you are. Why?

**Adam Back** (1:23)
Well, I think people are fascinated by the backstory of whose Satoshi is, because it's such a unique situation, right? They have such a culturally important piece of network technology and the mystery around its beginnings, right? So, but in the absence of information, people write their own stories. So just speculate, look at people.
Yeah, I mean, basically look at the lineup of people who are developers, who were interested in this kind of technology early on and sort of, you know, write a profile and compare and contrast. Could it be this one? Could it be that one? And so, you know, there's been a series, it was an HBO documentary last year, New York Times, another documentary, not after, not long after The New York Times. I mean, New York Times article, and I think a book coming as well. And then the, there's a documentary as well, a film.

**Amanda Cassatt** (2:22)
Is it annoying to have all these people think you're Satoshi? Does it cause kind of a bother?

**Adam Back** (2:27)
I mean, it takes, well, I mean, actually in 2013, when I got more actively interested in Bitcoin, like I knew about it from 2008, because I got the first-

**Amanda Cassatt** (2:38)
Because you were the first person Satoshi reached out to about it. So you see how they got this idea.

**Adam Back** (2:43)
Well, right. So in 2013, I was just kind of waiting to see, would Bitcoin get adoption? Then I saw a few things in the news and realized, okay, it's happening, right? So I do what everybody does, get down the rabbit hole. At some point after that, I got to thinking, wait a minute, the Bitcoiners might think it's me. I know this was not long after this Potoshi analysis that was suggesting how many Bitcoins Toshi might own speculatively, right?

**Amanda Cassatt** (3:13)
Is 21 your lucky number?

**Adam Back** (3:15)
No. I don't know how he arrived at 21 actually. It's a speculation about why 21 million are not 20 or 10 or something, right? But yeah. So I was like, well, that's not good because I don't have the money to take the security precautions, but there was nothing I could do about it, so I just rolled with it.
So that's still the case.

**Amanda Cassatt** (3:38)
What's the weirdest thing that's ever happened to you as a result of lots of people thinking you're Satoshi?

**Adam Back** (3:43)
Well, I think some people want to talk to you and they may be thinking that, which is a little bit of an odd vibe.
I think I'm generally happy to talk to anybody about Bitcoin. They're all friendly, enthusiastic about Bitcoin. I try to make very clear that it's not me, but I was involved in early technology and some of it predates Bitcoin.

**Amanda Cassatt** (4:06)
Hashcash.

**Adam Back** (4:07)
Right. Yeah.
So Hashcash, that was in 1997, and there were discussions on the CipherPunks mailing list from probably 95 to 2005 era, trying to work out how to make a decentralized electronic cash system, because there was a popular centralized one that failed. And the CipherPunks, who were interested in 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, you can't have a bank account, so you're stuck, right? And so when I proposed Hashcash proof of work for 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.