- Records of the communication between Adam Back and Satoshi Nakamoto are officially out.
- The emails indicate the significant inputs of Back in the crafting of the Bitcoin (BTC) whitepaper.
COPA v. Dr. Craig Wright
Last week, early Bitcoin contributors Adam Back and Martti ‘Sirius’ Malmi took the witness stand in a London court to testify in a case filed by the Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance (COPA) against Dr. Craig Wright. The lawsuit aims to get the court’s “negative declaration” of the latter’s claim that he’s the person behind the alias Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin.
The testimonies of the witnesses were anchored from their past interactions with the pseudonymous BTC inventor, who they firmly confirmed was not Wright. The information concerning their statements in court is still scarce, but thanks to Bitcoin Magazine, we just discovered the official records of the correspondence between Back and Satoshi.
This marks the first time for these conversations to be released public, although Back has already hinted about them a lot in his previous interviews. The papers reaffirm his prior tales on how he initially ignored the Bitcoin whitepaper when it was sent to him by Satoshi. These also somehow help quell the speculations that the chief executive of Blockstream and inventor of Hashcash may have been the cryptographer responsible for the digital asset that paved the way for the cryptocurrency revolution.
Emails of Adam Back and Satoshi Nakamoto
Here is a quick examination of the communication between Back and Satoshi from the development phase and release of Bitcoin:
The first email shows Satoshi informing Back of a peer-to-peer (P2P) electronic cash that utilizes Hashcash’s hash-based proof-of-work (PoW) concept to make sure that each transaction is immutable and protected against double-spending. The mysterious developer can also be seen modestly asking for the accuracy of the citations he placed on the attached prototype Bitcoin whitepaper.
The next conversation indicates that Back has not yet read Satoshi’s document but he does find a similarity between the proposed P2P e-cash with Wei Dai’s B-Money concept.
This is followed by Satoshi thanking Back for providing references to Dei’s work. Then, the Bitcoin inventor offers another rundown on how it adds PoW to support coin generation and network timestamping instead of relying on Usenet.
Back admits in his reply about not reading Satoshi’s whitepaper yet. However, he mentions one more paper related to the matter from Rivest called MicroMint.
The last notifies Back of the Bitcoin whitepaper’s release and thanking him for his insights. Satoshi clarifies that the system employs a hash-based PoW operation to generate a chain (now known as the blockchain) as a sort of ledger for the majority consensus and to reward users with new coins. The same email names software developer Hal Finney as another collaborator in Bitcoin’s crafting.
Final Thoughts
The email generally shows cordial communication between Back and Satoshi. It also does not give us anything about the enigmatic Bitcoin developer’s true identity, which leads us to believe that the one he was talking to had no idea about it as well. If this is the case, there shouldn’t be any more worries about potentially comprising the anonymity of Satoshi.