Adam Back | |
|---|---|
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| Born | July 1970 (age 53) London, England, UK |
| Education | University of Exeter |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | |
| Institutions |
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| Thesis | Parallelization of general purpose programs using optimistic techniques from parallel discrete event simulation (1995) |
| Doctoral advisor | Stephen Turner |
| Website | cypherspace |
Adam Back (born July 1970) is a British cryptographer and cypherpunk. He is the CEO of Blockstream, which he co-founded in 2014. He invented Hashcash, which is used in the Bitcoin mining process.
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]
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Back is a pioneer of early digital asset research similar to 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][better source needed][11][better source needed] 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.
