Blockstream CEO Adam Back was the first person contacted by Satoshi about Bitcoin. He big plans to make the network much more than a store of value system.

Dr. Adam Back, cofounder and CEO of Blockstream, is a British cryptographer and computer scientist, widely known for his 1997 invention of Hashcash, the proof-of-work system foundational to bitcoin mining.

As CEO of Blockstream, Dr. Back plays a central role in developing infrastructure and scaling solutions shaping the future of finance on Bitcoin. Key Blockstream innovations include the Liquid Network, Bitcoin’s first and leading sidechain, designed to enable faster, more confidential transactions, as well as the seamless issuance of digital assets, including stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs). Back is widely known in the crypto community because he had communications with Satoshi Nakamoto before the pseudonymous bitcoin creator wrote his seminal white paper in 2008.

In this discussion, we briefly cover some of his early work on Bitcoin. However, the majority of it relates to his work at Blockstream, which just completed a $210 million convertible note offering to create more functionality on top of Bitcoin.

Forbes: How did you first start working with Satoshi?

Adam Back: I was the first person to receive an email from Satoshi before it [Bitcoin] was launched. It wasn't a very detailed conversation. I believe he had already developed the software, and the next thing he'd done was write the white paper describing how it worked. He was citing related work and asked for the correct way to cite Hashcash. The next thing I heard was him telling me he had published the white paper and wanted to know if I would download the source code for Bitcoin. That was around January 2009.

Forbes: Do you think at this point it matters if we find out who Satoshi is?

Back: I think it is mattering less and less because we've got a lot of years of history now of experiencing Bitcoin as a decentralized thing. I think it gets viewed more like a discovery because it’s decentralized and there’s no CEO or founder, unlike some of the other projects. Humanity discovered physical gold as a good type of money. Now we've discovered a better one: electronic digital gold. We’ve gone through enough dramatic changes, like the Blocksize Wars, where the market ultimately prevailed, that it would not matter much if Satoshi returns. That is quite a positive outcome if you think about it because the market is a proxy for the user's wishes regarding electronic cash.

Forbes: Let's turn to Blockstream. The big use case for bitcoin right now is as a store of value. How do you reconcile that with your goal of making bitcoin a widespread payment system?

Back: We........

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