Hi guys, welcome to my new post again, y'all know I'm a bitcoin fan and today I'm bringing you little old facts about bitcoin and blockchain technologies, read on!
Cryptography is the underlying foundation of the blockchain. Cryptography dates back thousands of years when messages were written in codes to protect them from enemies.
Several papers were published during the 80’s and 90’s theorizing the use of cryptography combined with secure data chains and creation of digital currencies.
1982 – David Chaum wrote a paper titled “blind signatures for untraceable payments”, David Chaum is credited as being the inventor of digital cash and blind signatures.
1990 – David founded DigiCash which created an untraceable digital currency using cryptography, private and public keys and signatures. DigiCash declared bankruptcy in 1998 and its assets were sold to eCash technologies.
1997 – Adam Back created a proof-of-work algorithm to limit email spam known as hashcash. It required the sender of an email to prove they solved a computer puzzle before sending an email. This used computing power and resources, making it more expensive to send bulk spam emails.
1998 – Nick Szabo, proposed a decentralized digital currency called “bit gold”. This incorporated proof-of-work combined with a network of computers that accepted the proof-of-work as valid and incorporated it into the next puzzle with a timestamp. Bit gold was never created as a real currency, it only existed in theory.
1998 – Wei Dai published another paper titled “b-money, an anonymous, distributed electronic cash system”. The paper outlined the foundations for cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, and the paper is referenced in Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin paper.
It was the work during the 1980s to 2000s, along with the academic papers published, that laid the groundwork for Bitcoin and the blockchain.
2008 – Satoshi Nakamoto (which is widely regarded as a pseudonym) posted a paper on the internet entitled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. This paper outlines the creation of Bitcoin and blocks of transactions linked in chains. The paper never directly uses the words “block chain” together when referring to this method.
2009 – Bitcoin became more than just an idea in an academic paper when Satoshi Nakamoto created the Bitcoin network along with the first blockchain. The first mention of blockchain was as separate words “block chain”, in the original source code for Bitcoin.
This first blockchain was a core feature of Bitcoin, preventing double spending and acting as a distributed public ledger for all transactions on the Bitcoin network.
Nakamoto is credited with the mining of the first block on the Bitcoin network known as the “genesis block” with the message in it: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”
This message may have been left as proof that the date the first block was created was on or after the 3rd of January, along with being a comment about the failures within the current structure of banking and currency markets. The creator of Bitcoin and the blockchain, Satoshi Nakamoto, is still unknown. People suspect Nick Szabo or Wei Dei of being the creators of Bitcoin however they both deny it.
2015 – Ethereum blockchain launched, allowing decentralized applications and smart contracts to run on the blockchain. This enhanced functionality of blockchain technology is known as Blockchain 2.0.”