Adam Back on Why He's NOT Satoshi and Why That's Better for Bitcoin | Bitcoin Backstage

**Isabella Santos** (0:00)
How tired are you of people referring to you as Satoshi?

**Adam Back** (0:04)
It's not me, but I think it's actually good for Bitcoin that Satoshi stopped participating and left in 2011 from participating in the forums because it helps Bitcoin feel more like a commodity.

**Isabella Santos** (0:17)
Who's the founder of gold?

**Adam Back** (0:19)
Yeah, who's the founder of gold? We don't know, right?

**Isabella Santos** (0:25)
We're here with Adam Back. You've probably seen him everywhere. All the documentaries. Now, you're the newly appointed CEO of Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company.
Can you tell us a little bit about that? How did that happen? It was sort of like a plot twist.

**Adam Back** (0:41)
Yeah, so I was a relatively earlier investor in MicroStrategy, and then it met a planet. And so I looked at the different strategies and we were talking internally about starting our own to implement some of the strategy ideas that we had. So one of the different shares for BSTR is that it has an active approach. So it tries to put the Bitcoin to work to create a positive yield basically.

**Isabella Santos** (1:13)
Can you say like an active approach? What are you guys doing differently?

**Adam Back** (1:17)
Well, most of the treasury companies are storing the Bitcoin cold stored with a custodian, whereas we would use different strategies like option writing strategies or different hedge fund strategies to get to create a return above Bitcoin. And so of course the treasury companies are using market factors, like selling shares at the market, issuing convertible notes. So we're in a position to do that on top of an active strategy rather than a passive.

**Isabella Santos** (1:48)
Wow, that's super interesting. I'm talking here with Matt Cole and he was telling us how MicroStrategy is on the path to stack a million Bitcoin by September. He's going to have more Bitcoin than Satoshi himself.

**Adam Back** (2:06)
Yeah, it's pretty fast.

**Isabella Santos** (2:08)
How does that even look like for Bitcoiners or the Bitcoin culture, to have all these companies have so much Bitcoin?

**Adam Back** (2:15)
Well, I think it's effectively a sign of success that you have different types of entity buying and using Bitcoin as a savings or an inflation hedge. So, you know, now you have a few countries, El Salvador, Swiss National Bank that holds MicroStrategy, some of the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funds, Bhutan, other countries, right? And then the public companies, some pension funds. So Sean Bill, who is the CIO of BSTR and a well-known hedge fund manager who's interested in Bitcoin for some years. You know, he was able to get Bitcoin into the first US public market, sorry, public pension funds in 2021
So you will see, I think it's just that, you know, when the Internet was first available, it was improved self-sovereignty, but very people had it. It was all users, not companies, right? And over time, of course, all the companies have a website, email and apps and stuff like that. So it's, I think it's like that. It's another signpost on the adoption arc of Bitcoin. So long as it, you know, remains bearer, you can hold your own keys, it remains unseizeable, individuals can benefit from that. And you know, sometimes funds like to benefit from some of those properties as well.

**Isabella Santos** (3:31)
Wow. Now, also I want to talk about the Jade as well, because Jade Core launched today.
Can you tell us about the device? What gap it is designed to address, and how it fits within Blockstream's hardware wallet ecosystem?

**Adam Back** (3:46)
Yeah, so it fits between the Jade Classic and the Jade Plus.
So really, it's a simplified, streamlined experience for new users to generate a seed, start buying Bitcoin and cold storing it. So it's filling that market need.

**Isabella Santos** (4:03)
So self-custody has long been viewed as one of the strongest responses to counterparty risk. How does Jade Core help mitigate that risk while maintaining the security standards that people expect across the broader Blockstream ecosystem?

**Adam Back** (4:20)
You know, if you are cold storing, as the Bitcoiners say, not your keys, not your coins. So, yeah, you do your backups, you're then self-sovereign, you store your own Bitcoin. It's using a standard backup format, the seed format.
And you can use the hardware wallet in combination with Blockstream's mobile app or desktop app, and or with some other wallets that have Jade compatibility. So it's quite a lot of interoperability. And so I think it's, you know, for people who haven't experienced cold storage, you know, it's a good time to do it before the Bitcoin price is too high. And what you've seen in the past is sometimes people will have bought Bitcoin, casually stored it on a phone, and then, you know, they've suddenly realized five years or eight years later, that it's now 90% of their net worth and they need to revise their storage. So I think it's useful to sort of plan ahead a bit to cold store Bitcoin. And, you know, even if you have invested in Bitcoin via ETFs or an exchange, it's an interesting learning experience to get confidence, to start storing a bit of it yourself. Once you build the confidence, maybe you can cold store more of it.