In today’s Who’s Who section of Crypto.BI, we introduce Adam Back, a cryptographer from Great Britain who created HashCash, one of the most fundamental pieces of the Bitcoin software system.
Back obtained a Computer Science PhD degree from University of Exeter in the Distributed Systems research field.
Invention of HashCash
HashCash was an idea Adam Back developed to fight email spam.
By making each email cost a bit of computing time, which the email sender would have to prove by cryptographic means, mass email could be made expensive to the point of not being worth it. While spammers would collapse due to enormous costs, legit mailers wouldn’t even notice that their computer had performed some computational work before sending messages.
Bitcoin Mining
This proof of work scheme for email was adapted for Bitcoin mining, where miners must prove they performed a certain amount of work in order to reap mining rewards.
HashCash is a fundamental Bitcoin building block and Adam Back is widely recognized as an authority in the cryptocurrency field.
He has an active presence on Twitter where he often engages in interesting technical conversations with his followers.