History of Blockchain
If you’re a tech enthusiast like me and have been in contact with the modern technologies shaping our future, there are high chances you have already heard about Blockchain. One of the most thrown around word in the tech community nowadays and constantly making it into the headlines, I’m sure you must have come across the word in headlines like “Bitcoin is the future currency”, “Why Blockchain will reform the way the world operates”, “How Blockchain can Empower Refugees”, etc. This is the first article in the series How-to-Blockchain. In this article, we will dive deep into the past of blockchain and how it came to existence.
It was October 31, 2008. A guy (or a group of alien species, who knows?) after countless hours of hacking (not the one where people steal information of others) and testing and debugging, published a white paper under the name of “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” by Satoshi Nakamoto. Since then, the revolutionary design of the network has changed the lives of many and has completely transformed how we look at money today. This was the beginning of Bitcoin. Many people confuse this with the beginning of Blockchain. So buckle up the seat belt of your DeLorean because we are about to time travel back in 1991.
A pair of physicists, Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta were trying to solve a problem to keep the data secure, information safe, and resistant to tampering. They published their first article called “How to time-stamp a digital document”. It outlined a chain of cryptographically secured blocks to preserve the integrity of past information and protect it. The main focus here was to timestamp a block on the blockchain. By storing hash values in a timestamped block, one can prove the existence of that block at a given time. Not only the blocks were time-stamped by the server but the individual blocks were also linked to the previous block by timestamping the actual bits of the document, making no assumptions about the physical medium on which the document was recorded. But blockchain using timestamping alone was not powerful enough to be used on a large scale.
In 1993, a paper was released by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor which first explained the concept of Proof of Work. Though the term Proof of Work didn’t exist back then, it was described as a way to put a stop on network spam. The main idea was to make a user compute a moderately hard, but not untraceable, function to gain access to the information, thus preventing inane use.
Let’s ride back to 2008. By now, there was no such application of blockchain found to be 100% secure to use. But things took a sudden change on October 31st, 2008, when Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System was released. The whitepaper gained traction within days and since then it was often misunderstood by people as the blockchain. But let me make it clear for you, Blockchain is the technology on which a software Bitcoin is implemented. Bitcoin is just one of the many applications created on the blockchain.
2014, enter Ethereum. It was for the first time that people came to know about what blockchain is capable of and that we still haven’t discovered it’s full potential. Much more than just a cryptocurrency transaction, Ethereum was a world computer. Ethereum’s world computer is called Ethereum Virtual Machine or EVM. It allowed developers to program the Ethereum Blockchain and run computation. It was co-founded by Vitalik Buterin who at that time was only 19 years old.
By 2015, we experienced a boom in people’s interest in Bitcoin and by 2016 the finance sector accepted blockchain as a future technology to rely upon. In 2017, Harvard Business Review suggested blockchain as a foundational technology.
LinkedIn ranked Blockchain no.1 as the most important skills you will need to nail a high paying job in 2020. (Link to the page)
As we can see blockchain developer’s demand has been ever-increasing, it would be nice a time to hop on the blockchain train as it is still in its infancy and its full potential is yet to be discovered. We can compare blockchain with what HTTP used to in the early 1990s. Those who gained knowledge of it are some of the richest people on the earth. We will be learning more about blockchain in the upcoming blogs and will be starting from the very basics. See your later, Ciao…..
