30s Summary

Bitcoin’s popularity among financial institutions is strengthening its stability, according to Blockstream co-founder and CEO Adam Back. The US’s Bitcoin exchange-traded funds are increasing Bitcoin’s adoption by big banks and countries. Back sees many initial technical worries about Bitcoin have mostly disappeared, while admitting there are still areas for improvement. A new peak in Bitcoin’s hashrate, a measure of Bitcoin’s cybersecurity, on Oct. 21 shows increasing security.

Full Article

So, Bitcoin’s popularity among serious financial institutions is still going strong. This greatly reinforces the stability of Bitcoin, reckons Adam Back, who’s a big deal in the Bitcoin world.

Bitcoin has gotten a lot of adoption from these big institutions, especially thanks to US Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (think of these like stocks that you can trade). This is according to Adam Back. He’s a co-founder and CEO of Blockstream and he created Hashcash (which helped to set up the Bitcoin mining process).

Adam told Forbes in an interview that these funds mean that banks and other financial institutions want to keep Bitcoin products around. That’s a good thing for Bitcoin.

Adam also mentioned that besides banks, whole countries seem interested in Bitcoin. Some are even in the early stages of starting to buy Bitcoin or Bitcoin-related products.

Adam was one of the first developers of Bitcoin. He was the first person to get an email from the mysterious person who created Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.

By the way, his creation – Hashcash – lays down the groundwork for Bitcoin mining. It was originally used to stop junk email and online attacks.

Adam had another interesting point to make. He says that a lot of the initial technical worries about Bitcoin have mostly gone away. This came up around the time when the crypto industry was celebrating the 16th anniversary of the Bitcoin white paper (this is like the original blueprint for Bitcoin). It was on Oct 31 that Nakamoto first shared this white paper with a group of cryptography experts, including Adam.

Adam explains that in the early days, people were unsure about whether countries like the U.S., China or the entire Europe might ban Bitcoin. This created a lot of concern over regulations. But now, Bitcoin has established itself well enough to weather those concerns. Still, Adam admits there are areas where Bitcoin technology can get better.

A recent marker of Bitcoin’s growing security is new peak in its hashrate (a measure of Bitcoin’s cybersecurity), which hit 769.8 exahashes per second on Oct. 21.