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Adam Back Edit Profile

cryptographer

Adam Back is a British cryptographer and crypto-hacker.

Career

He is the inventor of hashcash, the proof-of-work system used by several anti-spam systems which inspired a similar system in bitcoin. He implemented credlib, a library that implements the credential systems of Stefan Brands and David Chaum. He was the first to formalize the Non-Interactive Forward-Secrecy security property for email and to observe that any Identity Based Encryption scheme can be used to provide Non-Interactive Forward Secrecy.

He is also known for pioneering the use of ultra-compact code with his 3-line Republic of South Africa in Perl signature file and non-exportable T-shirts to protest the (now relaxed) United States cryptography export regulations.

Today he is President of Blockstream, a company that seeks to further the development of bitcoin and blockchain technology. He has a computer science Doctor of Philosophy from University of Exeter.

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Hashcash has also been used in a number of other protocols such as combating blog spam, and defending against user namespace pollution.