Adam Back has been asked once again by various people for several weeks whether he is the inventor of Bitcoin. He isn’t, he says. In early April, The New York Times, after analyzing articles from the early cypherpunk era, suggested that Adam Back was the most credible candidate by far for Satoshi Nakamoto, which he has been saying for several years since he released Bitcoin’s design paper in 2008 and disappeared in 2011. A documentary released a few weeks later proposed two other candidates. Beck did what he usually does, which is to deny the allegation, explain why people keep doing this, and get back to work. “For the record, it’s not me,” he said in a polite tone in late April. “It’s very difficult to prove a negative.”‘The mystery surrounding the founder helped Bitcoin grow’Repetition doesn’t seem to bother him. The mystery has been useful, he says. A Bitcoin without a known founder is a Bitcoin without a single point of capture, without a chief executive to summon, a founding team to coerce, a charismatic individual whose departure could destabilize the network. He believes this is part of why the asset has reached the position it now occupies. “It helps us understand Bitcoin more as a digital commodity rather than as shares in a startup,” he told Bloomberg on the sidelines of the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas. “No one has a particularly strong influence.”Beck is British, holds a doctorate in computer science and is the chief executive of Blockstream, one of the oldest and best-capitalized infrastructure companies in the Bitcoin ecosystem. He is one of the few known people whose work has clearly influenced the design of Bitcoin. His 1997 paper on Hashcash – a proof-of-work algorithm to combat email spam – is cited in Satoshi’s 2008 whitepaper. More than a decade before Bitcoin was released, he was working on the problem of digital scarcity, according to his own account.‘An optimistic change’This asset is now held in regulated exchange-traded funds by the world’s largest asset managers, packaged by Nasdaq-listed firms to grab supply and debated on Wall Street as a candidate to hedge institutional portfolios.His view of change is clearly optimistic, given how far Bitcoin has traveled from the specific, conceptual project he helped create. ETFs and corporate treasury vehicles that have accumulated hundreds of billions of dollars of bitcoin are “effectively custodians on behalf of other investors,” Backe said. Multiple custodians, regulatory oversight, the constant availability of self-custody for those who want it: In the structure, he says, there are “barriers and competitors” that prevent any single entity from taking over the network. (Bloomberg)