John Carreyrou

Otherwise, they'd get in trouble.

And that struck me as potentially a reason why Satoshi had remained anonymous in releasing Bitcoin.

Another parallel was that they both seemed to have this strange preoccupation with spam.

Yeah, exactly.

Like junk mail.

Spam was something that loomed large in the life of Adam Back because he, in 1997, invented something called Hashcash to combat spam.

It was a statistical puzzle-solving system that,

whereby if your computer was the first to solve the puzzle, this mathematical puzzle, then you would get issued a permission to email.

In other words, it was like paying for a postage stamp.

It only took a few seconds for your computer to solve the problem.

It presented more of a problem for spammers who were sending hundreds of thousands of emails at once.

That tripped up spammers, and that was the point of Back's invention.

And now I noticed that Adam Back and Satoshi both talked about spam all the time.

Not only that, they discussed some of the very same spam-related ideas.

No.

I mean, some of these things, like the libertarian thing, you can apply generally to a lot of the cypherpunks.

There weren't many cypherpunks as obsessed with spam as Adam Back.

Right.

But I take your point.

These were more clues.