Read Adam Back’s full email with Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto.

adminFebruary 24, 2024

The full email correspondence between Hashcash inventor Adam Back and Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto is now public after being entered into official court records in the UK this week.

The five emails below detail the entire conversation between Nakamoto and Back, which is cited in the seminal Bitcoin whitepaper. The email sees the two cryptocurrency heavyweights discussing their work for the first time.

Baek has previously spoken publicly about the email, hinting at details of the conversation, particularly how he had not read the white paper in the first place, but the email marks the first time the full text has been made public.

Cryptocurrency celebrity and Blockstream CEO Adam Back has long been speculated to have been involved in the creation of Bitcoin, but these emails appear to undermine those suspicions.

To elaborate, the correspondence between the two was polite and professional. Back pointed Satoshi to some related papers, and Satoshi tried to clarify the unique contribution he added to Back’s previous work.

Hashcash, invented by Back in the 1990s, was a way to slow down email spam by forcing computer processors to prove that they had performed calculations before delivering messages. The system is a blueprint for the Bitcoin mining system, where a distributed network of computers compete to solve cryptographic puzzles and release new Bitcoins into the economy in return for their work.

Elsewhere, it became clear that Satoshi attempted to keep in touch with Encyclopedia by emailing him about the launch of the Bitcoin software in January 2009.

The release of these emails since their release this week has reignited interest surrounding Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity. This is because it matches other new emails presented by Satoshi’s early collaborators.

But while they are interesting relics of history, these emails do little to uncover Bitcoin’s essential mysteries.