Winning the Crypto War

Greetings,

Rizzo, the Bitcoin Historian here, back again this week to celebrate yet another Bitcoin legend.

Today, we’ll be diving into the story of a true pioneer, the only person still working on Bitcoin who was cited in the white paper — Adam Back.

Adam is one of the great cryptographers of the 20th Century: an early member of the cypherpunk mailing list, a soldier in the Crypto Wars, and his work laid the foundation to what would later become Bitcoin.

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The Man Who Inspired Bitcoin

The year is 1995, and a 25-year old PhD student from the University of Exeter in England is getting ready to change the course of the internet.

That student was Adam Back.

While most of us were just discovering what the internet was all about, Adam was fighting to protect it. He saw the web's potential for freedom, but also its menacing threats to privacy. Adam’s tool of choice was a somewhat obscure branch of mathematics dubbed cryptography.

In the realm of cryptography, his first entry point was a revolutionary piece of software: Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP.

Here’s Adam, sitting next to the inventor of PGP, Phil Zimmerman, explaining how these tools were, and continue to be, quintessential weapons for everyday citizens to protect themselves.

For Adam, PGP was more than just software – it was a revelation.

Here was a tool that could protect free speech, safeguard dissidents, and challenge government overreach. It wasn't just about hiding messages; it was about shifting the balance of power.

Adam dove deep into PGP, even compiling his own source code.

Thanks to PGP, Adam found a home in the cypherpunk community — a non-hierarchical collective of cryptographers, activists, and idealists who shared a common conviction: that the internet needed to be protected and maintained as a bastion for human freedom.

He joined the cypherpunk mailing list, a place for debates and discussions about freedom, software, and privacy.

Adam quickly began exchanging emails with Timothy May, who wrote the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, Hal Finney, who received the first Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi, Zooko Wilcox, a tenured crypto privacy activist, and Perry Metzger among many others.

But it wasn’t all talk, there, Adam proved to be a prolific cryptographer.

Weeks after he joined the cypherpunks, Adam took on a challenge to hack into SSL’s (Secure Sockets Layer) weak government-approved cryptography. By decrypting the code, Adam received a bounty issued by Hal Finney.

The '90s weren't kind to privacy advocates, however. The U.S. government, through the U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulator (ITAR), was hellbent on banning strong cryptography, classifying it as "unexportable munitions."

Essentially, they wanted a backdoor to all our communications.

The Crypto Wars were underway. Here’s Eric Hughes, author of the Cypherpunk Manifesto and one of the creators of the cypherpunk mailing list, describing the online battlefield.

Adam understood the threat, and began strategizing on how best to attack and retaliate against the state.

So, in 1995, Adam launched the 'International PGP Page,' a website that distributed encryption software globally by exploiting a legal loophole.

How? By offering the code in printed form, protected under the First Amendment. But Adam's most iconic move was the "Munitions T-Shirt."

He printed the "illegal" encryption code on shirts, turning fashion into protest. These shirts, sold for DigiCash (an early Bitcoin precursor), became a symbol of resistance. Some activists even got the code tattooed.

As the Crypto Wars dragged on, the inventor of PGP, Phil Zimmerman, was sued by the U.S. government for using strong encryption to protect emails.

Users—and supporters—like Adam believed that the government was “making math illegal.”

But Uncle Sam didn’t stand a chance.

Adam, and his fellow cryptographers, continued fighting back with what they knew best: code. He created a website to distribute “illegal” cryptography, where users with a click of a button would receive 1/700th of the PGP code.

That wasn’t the only weapon in Adam’s arsenal. In a bid to disrupt internet surveillance, he built a tool that would flag words like terrorist and assassination to his email signature.

Thanks to efforts from Adam, and several others, the cypherpunks won the Crypto Wars. Mathematics was free to roam the internet. Export regulations were relaxed, and cryptography was liberated for use in the U.S. and abroad.

But Adam had a realization: to truly have digital sovereignty meant a form of digital money that the state couldn’t control.

An anonymous digital cash was the holy grail of the struggle for online freedom, and Adam got to work.

In 1997, Adam dropped Hashcash. This wasn't just a spam-fighting tool; it introduced 'proof-of-work' to the world of digital cash. Before sending an email, your computer had to solve a puzzle. Easy for regular users, but a nightmare for spammers trying to send millions of emails.

But Hashcash was missing a key piece of the puzzle—how to fix the double-spend problem, or how to ensure that the same money wasn’t sent twice, a non-trivial issue online.

Adam kept tinkering away at the dream of e-cash well into the 2000s. He was even commissioned to consult about digital money for tech giants like Nokia.

But the true breakthrough came in 2008, when he received a mysterious email by an unknown developer named Satoshi Nakamoto. It brought to life a concept called Bitcoin, which had sorely eluded Adam and the cypherpunks.

When Satoshi first emailed Adam about Bitcoin in 2008, Adam was skeptical. He suggested Satoshi look into Nick Szabo's 'bit gold' concept. But as he dug into the whitepaper, Adam realized this was it. The holy grail of digital cash they'd been chasing for years.

Adam’s full email exchange with Satoshi surfaced this February. It's a must-read for any Bitcoin enthusiast.

Today, Adam continues to be one of Bitcoin’s biggest champions. A testament, to the faith he has in the project, and the need he sees for humanity what he has called “a new wonder of the world.”

We stand on the shoulders of giants like Adam.

I’d like to finish the week with a quote: ‘History is merely a list of surprises,’ I said. ‘It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.’ — Kurt Vonnegut

Until Monday,

Rizzo