Adam Back spent weeks being asked again by different people if he was Bitcoin. He said he wasn’t. He’s been saying this for years, ever since The New York Times dissected early cypherpunk-era writings in early April and suggested that Adam Baker was by far the most credible candidate for Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous figure who published a Bitcoin design paper in 2008 and disappeared in 2011. A documentary released a few weeks later proposed two other candidates. Buck did what he usually does, which is deny the attribution, explain why people keep doing it, and then go back to work. “For the record, this is not me,” he said in late April, in a polite tone. “It’s hard to prove no.”“Founder’s Mystique Helps Bitcoin’s Growth”The repetition didn’t seem to bother him. The mystery was useful, he said. A Bitcoin without a known founder is a Bitcoin with no single point of capture, no CEO subpoena, no founding team coercion, and no charismatic figure whose departure could destabilize the network. He believes that’s part of the reason the asset has reached its current status. “This helps Bitcoin be understood more as a digital commodity rather than a stock in a startup,” he told Bloomberg on the sidelines of the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas. “No one has a particularly strong influence.”Back is a Brit with a PhD in computer science and is the CEO of Blockstream, one of the oldest and best-capitalized infrastructure companies in the Bitcoin ecosystem. He is also one of the few well-known individuals whose work has had a clear impact on the design of Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 white paper cited his 1997 paper on Hashcash, a proof-of-work algorithm designed to combat spam. By his own account, he was committed to solving the problem of digital scarcity more than a decade before Bitcoin was released.“Optimistic transformation”The asset is currently held in regulated exchange-traded funds by the world’s largest asset managers and packaged by Nasdaq-listed companies, gobbling up supply and being debated on Wall Street as a candidate to hedge institutional portfolios.His view of this shift is decidedly optimistic, considering that Bitcoin has strayed far away from the niche ideological project he helped foster. Buck said the ETFs and corporate finance vehicles that have amassed hundreds of billions of dollars in Bitcoin “are effectively custodians on behalf of other investors.” Multiple custodians, regulatory oversight, ongoing self-hosting for those who want it: this structure has “limitations and competitors” that prevent any single entity from taking over the network, he said. (Bloomberg)
