No, it was not Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 that actually led to the creation of this revolutionary technology called the blockchain. It has quite a history and some interesting story which is worth exploring. This is what we will cover in this tale of the blockchain journey
Internet of Information To Internet Of Value:
The internet has been one of the most revolutionary technologies ever invented by humankind, which unofficially started in 1960 as a tool for government researchers to exchange information, at that time in 60’s computers were large and immobile, so to leverage any information stored in any given computers one has to travel to that location or required magnetic computer tapes sent through the conventional postal system.
But on January 1, 1983, the internet took birth officially with the advent of the TCP/IP network protocol which enables computers lying in different locations to share information over the network and talk to each other.
After the internet now blockchain as tech is considered to be the most innovative tech of the 21st century and is all poised to change the fate of humanity for good.
Internet was considered to be the medium of sharing information and blockchain is known to be the medium of exchanging values.
So what is blockchain and how this technology came into existence is what we want to explore in this blog.
The History Of Blockchain :
“I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.”
This message was floated over a cryptography-focused mailing list in October 2008, by the mystical creator of bitcoin named Satoshi Nakamoto. This mail had a link to a nine-page white paper:
This white paper described a technology that is considered to be pathbreaking and powers to disrupt the existing financial system (which is ailing due to devaluing of fiat money with the rising of uncontrolled inflation).
Bitcoin was introduced to the world with a bang in 2008 and became extremely popular, but what people knew least about was the underlying tech that makes Bitcoin special. Yes, it is blockchain. In fact, In his paper, Nakamoto never used the term blockchain. Instead, block and chain were used separately to explain the concept of many blocks, each containing data on transactions, all connected in a kind of chain. So from where this term blockchain came into existence, 2008’s announcement of bitcoin is definitely not the starting.
Blockchain Lineage:
- Stuart Haber & W. Scott: 1991
To understand the blockchain lineage, we have to time travel back into 1991. Stuart Haber & W. Scott wrote the first paper titled
“How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document”, where they proposed the concept of attaching a timestamp to the digital document.
This proposed doc set the tone for the blockchain, where Haber & Scott highlighted the importance of signing the transaction with a timestamp. They further went on to implement a Merkel tree which is also known as “Hash Tree”, that was used to store multiple transaction records in each block.
2. The Eternity Service” A paper by Ross Anderson in 1996:
In 1996, Ross Anderson, a renowned Cambridge university cryptographer, proposed a new paper named “The Eternity Service”, in this paper he explained the concept of the decentralized storage system.
He spoke about storing the information in the block which will be immutable and can't be deleted, this was the first paper that strongly stressed having a secure peer-to-peer system.
3. A Paper on securing logs by B. Scheier & J. Kelsey in 1998:
Two years later, after Ross, proposed the paper on decentralized storage, B. Scheier & J. Kelsey came up with ideas of protecting logs from untrusted machines through cryptography. They proposed the method in which a computer can prevent attackers from tampering with any previous logs stored while ensuring at the same time that these logs are not at all readable for any potential hacker/attacker.
4. Network File System By David Mazières and Dennis Shasha in 2002:
David Mazières and Dennis Shasha, are supposed to be the key contributor to the creation of the blockchain. In 2002 they proposed a decentralized network file system, where they spoke about how anyone writing data into the file can trust each other but not the network system. They stated that instead of trusting the system the actors would digitally sign the file data, with SHA256 encryption or similar hashing function, commit and append it to a chain of other blocks housed in an existing Merkel Tree.
This was for the first time anyone spoke about encrypting the transaction, as a medium of trust.
5. Nick Szabo: The Man who Popularizing Blockchain in 2005
In the year 2005 Nick Szabo, one of the celebrated blockchain evangelists created the simplified blockchain version which had all the flavor of past proposed papers. This blockchain version was introduced alongside his proto-cryptocurrency called Bit gold, which was one of his earliest attempts at creating a decentralized virtual currency, which he proposed in 1998.
This idea of the bit gold project was never practically implemented, but Nick Szabo’s idea of bit gold is widely considered to be the precursor to Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin protocol.
6. Satoshi Nakamoto Paper: “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” 2008:
As you can see, the journey to real blockchain tech creation is an amalgamation of all the past research papers proposed by popular cryptographers and researchers of the past which we covered. These researches set the strong foundation for the very popular Bitcoin paper proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, which established the real utility of blockchain as a technology, popularizing the concept of secured peer-2-peer decentralized transaction in the form of bitcoin.
Bottom line:
Now blockchain has come a long way where it is now moving from past proof-of-work mining technology, which is used by bitcoin and the current Ethereum 1.0 network. Now blockchain 2.0/3.0 is taking shape where one can see the implementation of proof-of-stake which is used as a mining protocol, to validate the transaction between two parties. The concept of smart contracts in the Web 3.0 age, has become extremely popular in the blockchain 2.0 world, which has led to the creation of a plethora of Decentralized applications that are using the new age blockchain protocols. The layer 1 scaling and layer 2 scaling is now on the rise to facilitate millions of transactions which were not earlier possible with the traditional blockchain protocol being used in the bitcoin and the ETH 1.0 platform.
Defi and Dapps are the new age financial system that is truly supporting the concept of democratized and decentralized finance and posing a serious threat to our ailing, traditional financial system which has failed to meet the financial aspiration of mankind.
What’s Next?
We understood the history behind the evolution of blockchain, next we will try to understand the various definitions of blockchain and will try to learn how these Blockchain technology functions in their entirety.
I will close this piece of article with this food for thought:
I feel blockchain is nothing but the most reliable medium to store & exchange values/assets between two humans where they both don’t need any third party to facilitate the transaction, which they have agreed to conduct without knowing much about each other. Faceless Trust & transparency is key here
Please Note!
This article was originally published on my Medium publication whose link is attached here:
https://medium.com/crypto-wisdom/the-tale-of-blockchain-how-it-all-started-171909983962
