Adam Back

Back was born in London, England, in July 1970.[1] His first computer was a Sinclair ZX81. He taught himself Basic, and spent his time reverse engineering video games, finding decryption keys in software packages. He completed his A levels in advanced mathematics, physics and economics.

He has a computer science PhD in distributed systems from the University of Exeter.[2] During his PhD, Back worked with compilers to make use of parallel computers in a semi automated way. He became interested in pgp encryption, electronic cash and remailers. He spent two thirds of his time working with encryption. After graduation, Adam spent his career as a consultant in start ups and larger companies in applied cryptography, writing cryptographic libraries, designing, reviewing and breaking other people's cryptographic protocols.[3]

Back's "Munitions" T-shirt featured computer code that was considered to be a weapon in the United States.

Back is a pioneer of early digital asset research similarly as Wei Dai, David Chaum, and Hal Finney.[4][5] In 1997, Back invented Hashcash.[6] A similar system is used in bitcoin.[7][8][9]

He also implemented credlib,[10][11] a library that implements the credential systems of Stefan Brands and David Chaum.

He was the first to describe the "non-interactive forward secrecy"[12][13][14] 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[15] and 3-line RSA in Perl[16][17][18] signature file and non-exportable T-shirts[19][20] to protest cryptography export regulations.[21]

Back was one of the first two people to receive an email from Satoshi Nakamoto.[22][2] In 2016, the Financial Times cited Back as a potential Nakamoto candidate, along with Nick Szabo and Hal Finney.[23] 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.[24]

On 3 October 2016, Back was appointed as CEO of Blockstream.[25] Since then he has introduced products such as the Liquid sidechain, Blockstream Mining Notes, mining colocation services, the Jade hardware wallet, and the Core Lightning implementation.

• Official website