Proof of Work Begins with Dwork & Naor (1993), Not Adam Back & Hashcash (1997)

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Adam Back is the co-founder and CEO of Blockstream, a for-profit company based in Canada responsible (by many) for the corporate take-over of Bitcoin.

Gregory Maxwell, Pieter Wuille, Matt Corallo, Mark Friedenbach, Luke Dash Jr, and many more Bitcoin devs are (or were in the past) associated with Blockstream, either as founding members or under a payroll as employers of this company.

Blockstream is often accused of the corporate takeover of the Bitcoin brand, centralizing its development and substituting previous developers (trusted by Satoshi) from core positions by canceling GitHub privileges.

It was late 2013 with Bitcoin's price skyrocketing, when Adam Back appeared in bitcointalk with this post: "who is this annoying Adam Back guy?" immediately hinting he wasn't there just for the discussion part, but would actively engage with Bitcoin's developments.

As far as that goes the bitcoin paper cites the hashcash paper for the proof-of-work, and uses it with small changes (not all of them positive).

Adam Back (2013) (source)

Satoshi referenced Adam Back for hashcash, a method proposed by Back to counter email spam and DoS attacks.

Source: The Bitcoin Whitepaper

Hashcash was announced by Adam Back in 1997, yet the whitepaper was released in 2002.

Was Adam Back the inventor of proof of work? Did he base his work on another paper, which only referenced years later, while denying knowledge of it? Was Satoshi aware of the academic papers released years before hashcash?

Is Hashcash (1997), A Reworded Version of "Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail" (1993)?

And while hashcash is considered the precursor to Bitcoin's Proof Of Work algorithm, some researchers started digging deeper and found that perhaps Adam Back's work on PoW method of combating email spam, was already in academia since 1993. A slightly different approach, yet some in the cryptographic community have mentioned hashcash as just a reworded version of previous work by academics Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor.

Adam Back was mentioned by Satoshi in the whitepaper, and there had been communications (emails are not publicized by Back) between the two, before the announcement of Bitcoin's whitepaper. Adam Back also pointed Satoshi to Wei Dai, where Satoshi explains the communication with Back. The emails between Satoshi and Back were never publicized, unlike the emails between every other person Satoshi approached.

Source: Reddit, r/btc

Proof of Work

The concept was invented by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor in 1993 as a way to deter denial-of-service attacks...

The term "proof of work" was first coined and formalized in a 1999 paper by Markus Jakobsson and Ari Juels

(Source:Wikipedia)

Proof of Work is the consensus concept used by all forks of Bitcoin (BTC, BCH, BSV). However, there is a misrepresentation of hashcash as the first paper explaining the concept of proof of work, since the same concept is described in the work by computer scientists: Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor since 1993 (the year of the release of the academic paper).

With Naor she also first presented the idea of, and a technique for, combating e-mail spam by requiring a proof of computational effort, also known as proof-of-work a key technology underlying hashcash and bitcoin.

Source: Wikipedia

Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail

(Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail, by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor.)

Source

Hashcash for many cryptographers and researchers is an application based on the idea of this previous work, yet it didn't succeed in its initial purpose to combat e-mail spam. With Bitcoin, though, and the mention on the whitepaper, it gained recognition.

Source: Saylor Academy

Saylor Academy (saylor.org) as one would have imagined belongs to Michael Saylor (CEO of Microstrategy and Bitcoin (BTC) evangelist.

There is a reference to the work of Dwork and Naor:

While Dwork and Naor did not propose the term, the type of solution they introduced would become known as a "proof of work" system. Users would have to literally show that their computer performed work, to prove that they spent real-world resources.

A nifty solution, but perhaps too far ahead of its time. The proposal never made it very far beyond a relatively small circle of computer scientists.

Source: Saylor Academy

The content is striving to explain the facts, de-emphasizing the previous solution, and explaining the idea was floating, and Back was shouting out loud about it in the cryptographers' mailing list. Yet, still, the same idea was proposed by Dwork and Naor at the beginning of the 90s, not in the mid-1990s:

Like many, Back was not aware of Dwork and Naor's proof-of-work proposal. But by the mid-1990s, he was thinking of similar ideas to counter spam, sometimes "out loud" on the Cypherpunks mailing list.

Source: Saylor Academy

So, at this point, we have to trust Back, when he declares he wasn't even aware such work already existed before his hashcash claims.

Source

I had a look and their approach is very similar to that of hashcash. (source)

It is not hashcash that looks very similar to a previous publication according to Back, but the work that was created five years ago looks very similar to that of hashcash.

Seems like a time paradox, and just from the beginning, the explanation seems to be raising even more suspicions.

The correct language by Adam Back should probably have been:

My work "hashcash" looks very similar to the concept this document suggests which was released five years before my invention. I haven't referenced it, yet, but will do so since the approach is different but the fundamentals are the same.

Back went on by explaining the differences between the two concepts, defending the originality of his work.

From a technical aspect, there are differences. The main issue is the proof of work, though, as a method to combat spam, which is clearly described in Dwork and Naor's paper.

Source: btcmanager

Adam Back has repeatedly inferred and directly stated that Bitcoin is using hashcash.

“bitcoin is hashcash extended with inflation control”

Adam Back

Back clearly wants hashcash to look completely original without being based on any previous work, and also wanted Bitcoin to seemingly be based on his invention (hashcash).

"bitcoin hashcash link, better explanation of the relationship between hashcash, rpow & bitcoin"

Adam Back, Wikipedia contribution (Oct, 2012)

"not sure why someone deleted, please stop! re-add bitcoin use case, hashcash is more widely known for its use in bitcoin than for email spam at this point"

Adam Back- Wikipedia contribution (Jan, 2015)

The association of hashcash with Bitcoin was a main concern of Adam Back since 2012, according to the above Wikipedia proposed edits by... Adam Back.

Blockstream

Interestingly, Adam Back co-founded Blockstream in 2014 and proceeded with an aggressive strategy of confrontation, and censorship of different opinions in the Bitcoin community since that moment, with the use of one key segment, Theymos.

Theymos is an anonymous individual, Blockstream approached, since it identified the importance of controlling information within the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Source

Theymos proceeded by limiting the visibility of arguments from the side that promoted on-chain scaling while adopting the logic of censoring opposition on r/bitcoin and bitcointalk (sites under Theymos administration).

Source

Theymos stance was difficult to understand, yet researchers found an interesting link between Theymos and Blockstream, on an event that is barely ever discussed and buried within the realms of bitcointalk (source1, source2).

(source).

Satoshi and the email exchange with Back

Adam Back was referenced by Satoshi in the whitepaper. Adam Back was a popular cryptographer in the cyphers camp, and reasonably became one of the first cryptographers Satoshi contacted.

He is also suspected by some researchers to be Satoshi (or part of a team under this alias). His past and his approach to Bitcoin, his academic background, and the use of "double-space" make Adam Back a possible candidate.

Although, any Satoshi thesis made so far, hardly offers any substantial evidence. As with all other names presented to be Satoshi "suspects", Back is clearly enjoying the association, however, he categorically denied any involvement with Bitcoin earlier than his first appearance in 2013.

Satoshi perhaps did not know of any similar to "Back's" hashcash work, however the same is difficult to tell about Back.

Satoshi contacted Adam Back before the announcement of the Bitcoin whitepaper, with emails that were never made public.

Source

Certainly, these emails contain information that fits Adam Back to keep private, otherwise, he would have made them public already.

It is the one piece required to solve the Satoshi puzzle, but may also contain more information that Adam Back later used for his purposes and plans with Bitcoin.

In conclusion

There is no accusation in this post against the work of Adam Back but references instead.

There is a correlation concerning the core idea behind both papers, yet, the methodology Adam Back used is slightly different. Equally different is the use of Hashcash within Bitcoin's Proof of Work.

Many questions arise though. From the hashcash "invention" to the sudden appearance of Back in Bitcoin in 2013 (paving the way since 2012) and the attempt to bear a resemblance between Bitcoin's PoW consensus and hashcash, almost claiming Bitcoin is his invention. Not to mention Blockstream, Theymos, and the Bitcoin Core devs that rallied behind Blockstream, supporting what is widely considered a corporal hijack of Bitcoin that left it crippled on-chain and unable to scale.

Back has referred HashCash as the beginning of proof-of-work (PoW), yet Pow was already documented in the 1993 work of Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor. After this was noticed by researchers, the response by Back was not convincing at all. The response doesn't change anything, though.

PoW (or Proof of Work) definitely has its roots in 1993 with Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor and not 1997 with Adam Back's version of hashcash. The cryptocurrency community is often misled by narratives and driven by speculation, enough to miss the point.

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Comments

Getting more information about hash cash it my first of hearing it, Adam should not have tried to claim that bitcoin was invention because it crystal clear that Satoshi nakamoto (unknown person) that created bitcoin I also wrote article about it.
https://read.cash/@Uniqueboy/why-government-keep-trying-to-shutdown-crypto-currencies-7de92099

$ 0.00
2 years ago

Two hands down to you man. You are not just writing an articles but also sharing the knowledge that everyone must know about the origin of crypto. It feels like we are just talking face to face, 😊

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2 years ago

This is crazy, your work is really bold and detailed, I see this as a research journal, like a university coursework.

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2 years ago

You’re too good in writing articles,... it’s like you studied history because I think most of your articles are not meant for the newbies like me.. thanks for sharing your idea on Adam Back and Hashcash though I don’t know them.

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2 years ago

Greetings, history will always be the best advisor, if there are doubts we can look at history and it will give us light, thank you for sharing on these interesting topics.

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2 years ago

Really good article man, you are really delving deep into the development and history and citing good sources on the way!

$ 0.05
2 years ago

This is really enlightening now I get to know what I miss from the beginning this article has really helped me a lot thank you pantera.

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2 years ago

You always got a very informative and interesting article.

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2 years ago

A great effort and research about the history of Bitcoin. What they are claiming and what is reality I comes to know by reading it with lot of evidences and proofs. Reality can't be hide as Bitcoin doing .

More power to you!

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2 years ago

Ohh I see. Thanks for this informative article!

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2 years ago

Hi, my friend,

Thank you for such an enlightening article on the genesis of one of the basics about Bitcoin. It is good that an article like this is disseminated in the community.

Knowing history helps a clearer vision of where we are now and where we want to be in the future.

Greetings.

$ 0.05
2 years ago

Good history lesson...Thanks 😊

$ 0.05
2 years ago

Is this history? I am very lucky to be able to read it. I can learn from here.

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2 years ago

It is part of history some within BTC today try to avoid explaining. Hashcash may have been referenced in the whitepaper, but Adam Back was not the first one to create such a solution.

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2 years ago

Thanks for the explanation Pantera

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2 years ago