While crypto fanatics have been buzzing with news about bitcoin price surges and Facebook’s introduction of its digital currency libra, the Bitcoin 2019 conference brought together some of the most significant people in the BTC community for a two-day event to discuss the current and future state of Bitcoin.
Among the conference speakers were Scott Stornetta, chief scientist at Yugen Partners, and Blockstream CEO Adam Back, the creator of Hashcash.
These two crypto scientists are particularly notable because they were directly cited by Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin white paper. At Bitcoin 2019, they came together for a discussion with Bitcoin YouTuber Naomi Brockwell about their contributions to the creation of Bitcoin and where they foresee the original cryptocurrency going in the years to come.
Stornetta’s Contributions to the Development of Blockchain
Stornetta co-authored three papers cited in Bitcoin’s white paper and was one of the first people working on creating a system that did not require people to trust a central authority. In the early days of Bitcoin, Stornetta realized there was a problem with recording transactions, so he suggested the creation of immutable records in order to track all bitcoin transactions.
“We’re going to not be able to know the difference between an old bit and a new bit, and all of the world’s records are going to be in bits, and that’s going to create a crisis of credibility,” as Stornetta described the problem during his conference panel.
According to Stornetta, he and Stuart Haber, who is also credited with the creation of blockchain technology, were struggling to solve the problem, so they
