15 years before the era of Satoshi ... Cypherpunk…👑
Before the emergence of Satoshi Nakamoto and the Bitcoin white paper in 2008, there was a small but very influential movement called Cypherpunks.
A group of programmers and tech activists, working since the early 90s, whose core belief is that individual freedom in the digital age can only be protected by encryption.
Their ideas were revolutionary at the time:
Rejecting government surveillance.
Empowering individuals to control their money and data.
Creating alternative monetary systems that do not rely on governments or banks.
From the womb of this movement, many experimental projects emerged that paved the way for Bitcoin:
DigiCash for Evans
b-money by Wei Dai
Hashcash by Adam Back
And here comes the role of Adam Back 👇
He is a British cryptographer, one of the early Cypherpunks. He invented the Hashcash system in 1997:
A mechanism based on what we now call Proof of Work. The idea was simple: to prevent spam by forcing the sender to solve a computational puzzle that consumes some computer power.
This idea, years later, became the beating heart of the Bitcoin network itself.
Satoshi explicitly cited Adam Back's work in his white paper and considered it the cornerstone upon which proof of work was built.
And thus we can say:
Before Satoshi came and gathered the threads into one complete system (Bitcoin), Cypherpunks were laying the foundation.
And Adam Back specifically was one of the most important builders who laid the first brick in the wall of financial freedom.
