Breaking news October 25th at 8pm
Adam Back says he doesn’t know who he is Satoshi Nakamotoshe has always only had contact with him via e-mail. But it was fundamental for Satoshi because in 1997 he invented hashcash, a system for blocking spam that inspired the bitcoin mining process. Back, born in London in 1970, is CEO of Blockstream and continues to develop the bitcoin blockchain technology: he has now developed Liquid Networkwhich speeds up transactions and increases the scalability of the blockchain, a necessary step to achieve the tokenization of all assets, i.e. the process of converting shares, bonds, real estate and raw materials into digital tokens to be placed on the blockchain to make it easier to access to small investors, a step also hoped for by Larry Fink, the big boss of BlackRock.
Who is Adam Back
Back is a guest at the third edition of the Plan B Forum in Lugano and on the eve, Thursday 24th, again in the city of the Canton of Ticino he participated in Thunderstorman event organized by Fulgur Ventures to present the opportunities offered by tokenization to institutional investors in traditional finance, with particular attention to family offices. Between one round table and another, Back answered questions from Milano Finanza.
Request. Why do you think Satoshi Nakamoto felt the need to create bitcoin?
Answer. In his writings he did not explain the motivation, but in the Genesis block he inserted in the code the first page of the January 3, 2009 issue of Times of Londonwhere the title stands out: «The Chancellor (of the Exchequer, ed.) on the brink of a second bank bailout». With this Satoshi gives the idea of being worried about the side effects due to the need to trust intermediaries and have a currency controlled by politicians. In his writings he talks about Quantitative Easing and moral hazard in a country that finds itself in a difficult economic situation.
Q. What is Satoshi’s recipe for resolving this situation?
R. The thing to do is to ensure that people who took irrational risks lose their money and that companies who acted more wisely buy assets so as to achieve a more prudent financial system. In reality, the opposite of what Satoshi hoped for happened: the central banks they printed an avalanche of money and governments bailed out the banks that made mistakes. This has only perpetuated the problems. And so the bitcoin white paper comes into play, in which Satoshi explains how to make transactions on the Internet without intermediaries.
Q. What has changed with the launch of bitcoin spot ETFs in the United States?
R. I think it is technically difficult for many people to buy bitcoin, as they are used to entrusting their investments to a broker. The brokers themselves often have no way to buy directly, but now thanks to Etf they have the opportunity to expose themselves to bitcoin and so, through them, even small investors without technical skills can do so.
Q. The Italian government has increased the tax rate on capital gains from bitcoin to 42%, explaining that it wants to discourage this investment because it has no social utility…
R. It’s a very aggressive statement. Instead, I think that bitcoin has a lot of social utility because it protects against inflation, which is a form of taxation. When governments make economic and financial policy errors, however, they try to make the entire society pay for these errors. I understand that the bitcoin is very unpopular among politicians because it allows citizens to protect themselves from their mistakes.
Q. How much will bitcoin be worth at the end of the year?
R. It is quite realistic that it will reach $100,000. And by the end of 2025 it could reach $500,000. Within the next two years, then, I think that its capitalisation, which today is around 1,300 billion dollars, will reach that of gold. This is because there will be one reallocation of portfolios: in my opinion many investors, including states, will sell gold to invest part of the proceeds in bitcoin. One symptom of this coming development is that flows into bitcoin ETFs are increasing while outflows from gold ETFs are increasing. I am convinced that bitcoin will increasingly be considered digital gold also because it is much easier and cheaper to buy and sell bitcoins than ingots. (reproduction reserved)
