The full email correspondence between Hashcash inventor Adam Back and Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto is now public after being placed in the UK's official court records this week.
The full conversation between Nakamoto and Back, cited in Bitcoin's founding white paper, is detailed in the five emails below. In the emails, the two crypto heavyweights can be seen discussing the work for the first time.
Although Back has previously spoken publicly about the emails, hinting at details of the conversation, and particularly how he neglected to read the white paper at first, the emails represent the first time the full text has been made available.
Adam Back, a renowned figure in the cryptocurrency world and chief executive of Blockstream, has long been suspected of having been involved in the creation of Bitcoin, although these emails likely weaken those suspicions.
As detailed, the correspondence between the two was polite and professional, with Back pointing Satoshi to a few related articles, and Satoshi seeking to clarify the unique contributions he added to Back's earlier work.
Invented in the 1990s by Back, Hashcash was a method of slowing down email spam that tricked a computer's processor into proving that it had performed calculations before transmitting the message. The system is the model for Bitcoin's mining system, in which a distributed network of computers compete to solve cryptographic puzzles and, in exchange for that work, release new bitcoins into the economy.
Elsewhere, it is now clear that Satoshi tried to stay in touch with Back, sending him an email in January 2009 regarding the release of Bitcoin software.
Since their release this week, the release of these emails has reignited interest around the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, as it coincides with other new emails submitted by Satoshi's early collaborators.
While an interesting relic of history, these emails do little to shed light on the core mysteries of Bitcoin.