Financial institutions want Bitcoin and ETFs: Blockstream’s Adam Back

Bitcoin’s institutional adoption remains strong, increasing the resilience of the world’s first cryptocurrency, according to Adam Back.

 is “bootstrapped sufficiently” in terms of institutional adoption, partly thanks to the United States spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), Adam Back, the co-founder and CEO of Blockstream and the inventor of Hashcash, told Forbes during an interview. He continued:

“Now the ETFs mean that the issuing financial institutions are interested in expanding those products and keeping them in the market. So the banking or financial institutional lobby now wants that to be there.”

Back noted that others also remain interested in Bitcoin adoption, including entire countries:

 “You’ve got some other allies, too. You’ve got the early stages of sovereign wealth funds and countries buying Bitcoin or Bitcoin-related products and instruments.”

Back was an early Bitcoin developer and the first person to receive an email from pseudonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

His invention, Hashcash, provided the foundation for the Bitcoin mining process as the first proof-of-work system used to tackle email spam and denial-of-service attacks.

Bitcoin’s initial technical risks have mostly faded: Adam Back
The famous cryptographer’s comments came shortly after the crypto industry celebrated the Bitcoin white paper’s 16th anniversary on Oct. 31, which is when Nakamoto shared Bitcoin’s foundational technical document to a list of cryptographers, including Back, for the first time.

Speaking about Bitcoin’s growing maturity, most of its initially perceived risks have faded, explained Back, adding:

“I think that many initial risks around Bitcoin have receded because the original perception was that it was quite uncertain if a major country or an economic zone like Europe, China or the US would ban Bitcoin. That created a lot of perceived regulatory risk. But I think at this point, Bitcoin is bootstrapped sufficiently.”

While Bitcoin’s technological risks have also subsided, there’s still room for innovation for the world’s first blockchain network, added Back:

“It’s still challenging to scale blockchains. They’re broadcast mechanisms, and I think there’s still room for innovation and improvement about how to do that. Lightning is pretty reliable and nice for point-of-sale terminals and person-to-person payments, but there’s still room for improvement.”

Showcasing the network’s growing security, Bitcoin’s hashrate hit a new all-time high of 769.8 exahashes per second on Oct. 21. Hashrate is used as a measure of Bitcoin’s cybersecurity.

source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/financial-institutions-bitcoin-etfs-blockstream-ceo-adam-back