ALEX GLADSTEIN / Bitcoin Magazine OCT 13, 2021
How Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin project married the concepts of digital cash and digital gold and how pioneering cryptographer Adam Back continues the work of making it a better tool for freedom.
One summer day in August 2008, Adam Back got an email from Satoshi Nakamoto.
It was the first time Nakamoto had reached out to anyone about a new project that the pseudonymous programmer or group of programmers called Bitcoin. The email described a blueprint for what a group of privacy advocates known as the cypherpunks considered the Holy Grail: decentralized digital cash.
By the mid-2000s, cryptographers had for decades tried to create a digital form of paper cash with all of its bearer asset and privacy guarantees. With advances in public-key cryptography in the 1970s and blind signatures in the 1980s, “e-cash” became less of a science fiction dream read about in books like “Snowcrash” or “Cryptonomicon” and more of a possible reality …