The mystery surrounding the identity of bitcoin’s anonymous creator – Satoshi Nakamoto – continues, and now people have found a new candidate to point the finger at. According to many analysts within the space, bitcoin’s inventor is allegedly a man named Adam Back.
Is Adam Back the Creator of BTC?
Last month, a YouTube channel known as “Barely Sociable” – which enjoys more than 400,000 subscribers at press time – released a video that was approximately 40 minutes long. This video claimed that Back – a 49-year-old PhD holder from the United Kingdom – is Nakamoto, and the video’s creators aren’t backing down. At the time of writing, the video has accumulated more than 300,000 views.
As it stands, Back’s PhD is in computer science, so no doubt he would have the technical knowledge to create the world’s first and leading cryptocurrency. As a British cryptographer, he initially invented something called Hash Cash in the early 1990s, which uses a system of verification similar with that of bitcoin. In addition, it looks like he may have been the first person contacted by Satoshi in 2008, who had questions about Back’s invention.
Of course, Back completely denies that he’s the inventor of bitcoin, and was quick to mention that he’s not Satoshi. In a June 1 interview in Malta, Back explained to his listeners:
It’s generally viewed at this point as better that the founder of bitcoin is not known, because a lot of people have a hierarchical mindset. If you read about a technology, you try to figure out who is the CEO of a company, and people want to ask you questions. Because bitcoin is more like a digital version of gold, you wouldn’t want gold to have a founder. For bitcoin to keep a commodity-like perception, I think it’s a good thing that Satoshi stays out of the public.
When asked by his questioner whether he was Satoshi, Back simply replied:
No, I am not.
BTC Will Get Much Bigger
He claims that bitcoin’s newfound popularity makes a lot of sense considering what’s going on in the economy. For the most part, he’s bullish on the currency and isn’t selling what he owns, as he believes the currency is likely to reach as high as $300,000 within the next five years. He explained in the interview:
It might not require additional institutional adoption because the current environment is causing more individuals to think about hedging and retaining value when there’s a lot of money printing in the world… It is causing people to think about the value of money and looking for ways to preserve money. It’s a difficult environment to get any yield.
Back was also critical of the “anti-crypto” call hosted by Goldman Sachs, in which the investment and financial firm claimed that BTC and cryptocurrencies were “not an asset class.”
