Adam Back is a British computer scientist and cryptographer known for his work in the field of digital currency. He is best known as one of the original developers of Hashcash, an early proof-of-work system used to combat spam emails, and he also founded Blockstream, a blockchain technology company.
Back was born in 1965 and grew up in London, England. He studied mathematics at Oxford University before going on to earn his PhD from Manchester University in 1992. After completing his studies, Back went on to become a research fellow at Cambridge University where he conducted research into cryptography and network security protocols.
In 1997, Back developed Hashcash alongside researchers from Intel Research Labs which would later be adopted by Microsoft as part of its anti-spam measures for Outlook Express email clients. In 2005 he launched Credentica Signata Inc., an online identity management firm that provided secure authentication services including two-factor authentication using public key infrastructure (PKI).
In 2014 Back co-founded Blockstream with several other prominent figures in the cryptocurrency industry such as Austin Hill and Gregory Maxwell; they are credited with introducing sidechains to help facilitate faster transactions between different blockchains by creating bridges between them that enable assets or data to move securely between them without first having to go through middlemen like exchanges or brokers. The company has since gone on to launch multiple products including Liquid Network—a bitcoin payments platform designed for large enterprise customers—and Lightning Network—a high throughput second layer payment protocol for Bitcoin built on top of the existing blockchain architecture that can handle millions of transactions per second making it more suitable for everyday use cases than Bitcoin’s native blockchain transaction speed capabilities can currently provide alone.
As well as being involved with Blockstream, Back has been actively engaged over recent years speaking at numerous conferences related not only cryptocurrencies but also privacy rights topics; most notably participating regularly within discussions around censorship resistance technologies such as Tor Project’s development initiatives being undertaken via their Digital Privacy Fund initiative amongst others which includes actively funding development projects across many areas involving privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) often referred support decentralization efforts directly or indirectly associated with open source software applications/platforms/tools related generally within decentralization movement itself throughout much broader tech community outside just pure cryptocurrency space too…
