Adam Back

Adam Back
Back in 2025
Born	July 1970 (age 56) London, England, UK
Education	University of Exeter (PhD)
Scientific career
Fields	Cryptographic protocols Electronic cash Privacy-enhancing technologies Distributed systems
Workplaces	Zero-Knowledge Systems Pi Corporation Blockstream
Thesis	Parallelization of general purpose programs using optimistic techniques from parallel discrete event simulation (1995)
Doctoral advisor	Stephen Turner
Website	cypherspace.org/adam

Adam Back (born July 1970) is a British cryptographer and cypherpunk. He is the CEO of Blockstream, which he co-founded in 2014. He invented Hashcash, which is used in the bitcoin mining process. An investigation by The New York Times suggested that he may be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of bitcoin, though Back has denied this claim.