Adam Backs success in picking winners - or perhaps making the fewest mistakes - has propelled him to the forefront of cypherpunks.  So this is a good time to look back at his original proof-of-work idea. It was before my time but I gather the list had a problem with spam and ' hashcash' was a proposed workaround for that. I don't think it worked as advertised since Mong opted for open slather and Gilmore declared ' The death of cypherpunks '. The long-running civil-war between governance by code or down by law.  Adam has always eschewed the overtly political so tilting toward code even when situations get blurred and ' code is law ' and ' code is whatever Mongo sez it is '.  Temperamentally conservative he capitalized brilliantly off Btc and helped build the WL Trojan Horse. There is no-one else in this space with this sort of hefty reputation capital. Its a citadel in its own right. The Blockstream satellite almost just a cherry on top. Praise with faint damns for the bullgoose loony cypherpunk disguised as a meek, mild mannered publicist for a major metropolitan newspaper. If he ever needs a doorman for the Blockstream building. Here I am.