In the fourth email of the chain, sent eighteen minutes after Satoshi’s reply thanking Back for the b-money reference, Adam Back’s second reply suggested another related paper: “PayWord and MicroMint” by Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir (1996), which proposed extracting k-way hash collisions for digital coin scarcity rather than the partial pre-images used by Hashcash and later by Bitcoin. The load-bearing self-admission in this email — written before he had read the paper at all — was the following. (A 2025 profile in Token Dispatch separately quotes him saying he “initially failed to read the Bitcoin whitepaper carefully,” “probably my biggest mistake.”)
Adam Back (email to Satoshi, August 21, 2008, 6:17:17 PM UTC)Sorry still not read your paper yet,
Satoshi never cited MicroMint and never named it in the record; what Satoshi knew before the code was done sets it beside the other precursors that reached him only once his code was nearly finished.
Despite being among the first people Satoshi contacted, Back did not engage with the linked draft at this point. The chain went silent for nearly five months until Satoshi wrote again on 2009-01-10 — the day after Bitcoin’s v0.1 release. Back would not actively engage with Bitcoin until 2013. His later remarks on that delay are collected in the retrospective, and this admission is weighed as counter-evidence in the Adam Back Satoshi-identity hypothesis.
