On several occasions we have exposed cases of people who supposedly created the Blockchain technology years before Satoshi; we emphasize that they are assumptions given that it was Satoshi who named him in the first place. In this article we will present the case built by Motherboard, a branch of technology news from Vice.
First Blockchain in the world
You have to start with the way they decide to define what this technology is:
It is just a database maintained by a network of users and secured by cryptography. When new information is added to the database, it is divided into "blocks", which can be considered as containers for this data.
From time to time a new block is created and linked to a "chain" of previously created blocks. Each block has a unique ID called hash, which is created by executing the ID of the block that preceded it and the data stored in the current block through a cryptographic algorithm. This guarantees the integrity of all the data stored in the block chain because altering the data in any block would produce a different hash.
We highlight the key words that they use to characterize what Blockchain is, being the basis for their theory, with particular emphasis on hashes.
You explain that, to the extent that they constitute a chronological string of hash data, they were invented for the first time by Stuart Haber and Scott Stronetta in 1991 , being their main bibliographic source " The Journal of Cryptology ". Explaining that both inventors decided to develop this idea to find the solution to verify documents.
The main reason why they started the project was the human limitation, because at that time the only means to verify a document was the state of the envelope where it was packaged and a wet seal. Clearly both can be easily violated, therefore, the solution should be beyond the capabilities of man, using the digital space.
As Haber and Stornetta realized, placing a time stamp on a digital document would require solving two problems. First, the data itself should have the time stamp "so that it is impossible to change even a bit of the document without the change being evident". Second, it would have to be impossible to change the timestamp itself.
The solution to which Haber and Stornetta arrived was to execute the document through a cryptographic hash algorithm , which produces a unique identification for the document. If a single bit is changed in the document and it is executed again through the hash algorithm, the ID will be totally different. This idea was combined with the related idea of digital signatures, which can be used to uniquely identify the signatory.
Therefore, instead of sending the entire document to a sealing service, users could simply send the cryptographic hash value, which the service could sign to make sure it had been received at a certain time and was not damaged, such as notarizing an IRL document.
With this idea, the New York Times and the Blockchain idea come into play.
Surety
The main product of Surety is called " AbsoluteProof " which acts as a cryptographically secure seal in digital documents. Customers use Surety's AbsoluteProof software to create a hash of a digital document, which is then sent to the Surety servers where it has the time mechanism to create a stamp.
This stamp is a cryptographically secure unique identifier that is then returned to the software program to be stored for the client.
At the same time, a copy of that seal and any other seal created by Surety's customers is sent to AbsoluteProof "universal registry database," which is a "hash string" composed entirely of Surety customer seals. This creates an immutable record of all seals of guarantee ever produced, making it impossible for the company or any malicious actor to modify a seal.
Instead of publishing customer hashes in a public digital book, Surety creates a unique hash value of all the new stamps added to the database every week and publishes this hash value in the New York Times . The hash is placed in a small ad in the classified section of the Times under the heading "Notices and lost and found items" and has appeared once a week since 1995.