It’s been a life of hacks for Dr. Adam Back, the CEO and co-founder of Blockstream. One of the few people quoted on the Bitcoin Whitepaper, hacking highlights of Back’s life are brought to life in the latest animated Crypto Story from Cointelegraph’s video team. 

Over a game of Jenga in a park, Back told Cointelegraph that he’s always had a “kind of security mindset.” From his days as a student, he tinkered with door codes, pin pads and locks, testing out code and gaining access to places he “wasn’t supposed to have access to.”

Back talks through the creation of Hash Cash, one of the early attempts at digital money. He uses the “Birthday collision” as an allegory for hash functions, demonstrating his aptitude to breaking down complex functions into intelligible language:

“If you have a room full of people at a party or something, there's a question which is how many people need to be in the room before there's 50/50 chance that there are two people with the same birthday.”

He explains that while people would expect the outcome to be related to the number 365–because of how many days there are in a year, the reality is far lower. This line of thinking, combined with an understanding of spam email, led to Back’s coding up of Hash Cash.

Related: Blockstream CEO Adam Back talks Bitcoin over a game of Jenga

Bitcoin stands on the shoulders of Hash Cash, but Bitcoin caught on because Bitcoin ˙as a high level of decentralization, vital for the cryptocurrency’s success. Back adds that Bitcoin is also “Understandable at lots of different levels, right?”

“You can understand it from a user level or from an economics level. It's surprisingly complex to fully appreciate all of it, including the game theory and things like that.”

The cartoon interview comes to a close with a reference to Blockstream’s decision to beam Bitcoin into space and an affirmation that there will be “More Bitcoin,” from one of the Bitcoin economy’s OGs.

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When taking its blockchain public, “there was an adjustment period where we had to learn to love crypto,” Kadena founder and CEO Stuart Popejoy said. The admission sounded more like a technical adjustment than a surge of emotion on his lips, but he added, “The people who participate in your ecosystem really are your network and that is obviously not a very enterprise-y thing, that’s very grassroots.” 

The merits of private blockchains remain a matter of debate, but Kadena transitioned from a private JPMorgan blockchain in 2016 to a public spinoff in 2020, taking Popejoy, formerly a JPMorgan executive, with it.

“There was some innovation in private blockchain for a second, and that kind of represents us.” However, “there was this idea that we needed something […] that could serve business-scale needs, and that’s how we arrived at our version of a public blockchain,” Popejoy said in an interview with Cointelegraph, adding:

“This stuff is never going to take off if it can’t handle industrial loads.”

Kadena has horizontal scaling as a feature. “We focused on safe smart contracts and scalability as a safety thing, in the sense of risk management, like if you have to wait a day for your Bitcoin transaction go through,” when the system is backed up, Popejoy said.

Popejoy mentioned Bitcoin frequently. He said:

“We were very thrilled by the fundamental design of Bitcoin.”

“We believe that the real problem with proof of work is not that it uses energy, it’s that it uses energy inefficiently,” he added. “Bitcoin: there’s all this energy being used and it’s not improving the system. It’s the same slow system it was 10 years ago.”

Related: The blockchain trilemma: Can it ever be tackled?

Like Bitcoin, Kadena uses a proof-of-work consensus mechanism, “but it scales it so that we actually have horizontal scaling for proof of work,” Popejoy said. “We like to say, and it’s true, because I know how this stuff actually works, we could settle the entire U.S. stock market today, daily, on Kadena.”

Not everyone sees that speed as a benefit, but Popejoy pointed out that clawbacks can be programmed into smart contracts and security tokens.

Kadena currently has 20 chains running in parallel, but more chains would use the same amount of energy.

The real issue with proof-of-work is the distribution of money. “Proof of stake produces money and then it uses ownership of money to determine who runs the system,” Popejoy said. Proof-of-work “is the fairest distribution for getting coins into people’s hands.”