Two Persons Referred to in Bitcoin White Paper Share Views on the Future of Cryptos

Two persons cited on the Bitcoin white paper – Blockstream CEO Adam Back and Yugen Partners Chief Scientist Scott Stornetta, share their thoughts on the future of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technology in the whole.

Blockstream CEO Adam Back, the person responsible for creating hashcash, and Yugen Partners Chief Scientist Scott Stornetta, who co-authored three other papers cited in the Bitcoin white paper, were asked to share their thoughts on the future direction of Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency space more generally.

YouTuber Naomi Brockwell went on to ask them about Bitcoin’s crazy price swings and continued movement upwards on the back of multiple reports the price had reached a bottom late last year and Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency announcement. Also, there was another rather interesting Bitcoin event last week that was somewhat overlooked.

Bitcoin 2019 conference happened last week in San Francisco and there was plenty to talk about. Stornetta joked that the fact he was wearing a suit and tie and now works as a private equity investor in the blockchain space does not mean he’s “gone to the darkside” or sold out. He said:

“Let me just state unequivocally that I am a fundamental believer in the ability of these technologies, basically the cryptographic technologies writ large, to level the playing field . . . I’m not a crypto-anarchist, but I certainly am a crypto-libertarian. And I think we are going to get to the world that we want and that we deserve. We just need to find a path that leads from A to B.”

He added that he is pretty much bullish on Bitcoin over the next ten years, but added that he believes distributed ledger technology will be further broadened and diversified in the future.

“I think there’s plenty of potential for Bitcoin to kind of work out the issues that you’re talking about, but there’s potential for other things. I think we’re going to see a real flourishing, and it doesn’t all have to be about money, of course.”

Back, on the other hand, said that “Bitcoin time” appears to move even faster than “internet time,” which is a reference to the fast pace at which new advancements and innovations are made in the space.

He commented:

“It’s pretty challenging to even keep up with the pace of new things that are being developed — new ideas and implementations of them. Blockchain and bearer electronic cash is a whole new sort of building block, and it has implications with smart contracts. Basically, it’s sort of like picking up a new programming language with a new paradigm, and it takes a while for people to natively understand it and reach the conclusion of what kinds of things you could build with it.”

He said that in terms of coins, he looks at it as a sort of TCP/IP — that there’s one “interoperable standard”. He added:

“And it’s kind of lingua franca for exchanging value. And if any kind of innovation can be adopted in layers or, ultimately, people can import Bitcoin’s UTXO set to another data structure if a new data structure is found.”