Adam Back is the British cryptographer who in 1997 invented Hashcash, the computational method on which bitcoin mining still rests today. Satoshi Nakamoto cites him by name in the 2008 bitcoin white paper. Since 2014 Back has been building infrastructure for bitcoin with the company Blockstream: the Liquid sidechain, a satellite service and the Jade hardware wallet. In April 2026 he also moved to the center of the question of who Satoshi is. He denies it.
For investors, Back is more than a footnote in crypto history. Anyone buying bitcoin today relies on a security model whose core he described almost three decades ago. How to buy bitcoin and what providers charge is shown in our buy bitcoin comparison. This profile sets out what Back invented, what Blockstream does and what there is to the Satoshi theory.
Who is Adam Back? Cryptographer, cypherpunk and Blockstream chief
Adam Back comes from Britain and belongs to the generation of the cypherpunks. That was the name of a loose group of programmers and cryptographers in the 1990s wh...
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