Adam Back was the first person that Satoshi Nakamoto ever emailed. As the story goes, Satoshi just wanted to make sure he cited Back’s paper right.
As I’ve previously written, Satoshi already had access to the citation so this email was about something else. I wrote:
Dozens of people and papers were regularly citing Back and the format was widely available. Instead, Satoshi most likely used this email as an excuse to strike up a conversation with Back. Indeed, he invites Adam Back to download a pre-release of his paper and to “feel free to forward it to anyone else” he thought would be interested. He also tells him that he’s almost done with a C++ implementation to release as open source. Satoshi, therefore, was trying to build up interest in his work with the person he thought would find it most compelling. Satoshi may have even been a fan of his.
Naturally, skeptics of the Jack Dorsey is Satoshi Nakamoto theory, have argued that if Jack is Satoshi then there has to be something that not only ties him to the cypherpunks but to Adam Back.
To that end, on January 21, 2025, Jack Dorsey mentioned on the Citadel Dispatch podcast that he remembered the Adam Back t-shirts as a youth.
“Really when I was a kid, I loved alt.cypherpunks. I loved Usenet, I loved what those guys were doing. I followed the mailing list. Wired back in the day, was like wild, like it was underground back then, and it was following all that activity, starting with PGP and Philip Zimmerman, and exporting the code by Adam Back on a t-shirt in Perl, like all that was just like, that was my joy. I wasn’t working in that space, but it was my joy.” – Jack Dorsey.
As it would turn out there’s a photo of Jack wearing the Adam Back RSA perl munitions shirt in the 1996 University of Missouri–Rolla yearbook.
And as is stands, Jack Dorsey was also only one of the ~1,300 subscribers (under [email protected]) to the cypherpunk mailing list in the 1990s.
That email address is confirmed at belonging to Jack
I found 3 new Jack Dorsey email signatures from '95 – '97. The hex surrounding them spells: crypto.
The one that says "higher power" is a mersenne # discovered in '96 and it's a copy/paste of what Tim May, co-founder of the cypherpunks, used to put in his signature. pic.twitter.com/4nGP3k5CN4— Seán Murray (@financeguy74) February 12, 2025
So Jack Dorsey, one of only 1,300 cypherpunks in the world, was also such a fan of Adam Back that he worse one of his perl munitions t-shirts.
To add coincidence to coincidence the University of Missouri–Rolla’s mascot was Joe Miner and the sports team named… the Miners. One wonders where Satoshi may have gotten the idea to coin the phrase Bitcoin Miner and Bitcoin mining.
Further, Jack joined the university’s chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1997. As previously covered in great detail, Satoshi Nakamoto’s primary source material was an ACM research paper from 1997.
Jack Dorsey was a double major in Computer Science and Mathematics but transferred to NYU during his Junior year so that he could work at Dispatch Management Services with Greg Kidd.