The History of Blockchain — How it All Started — PART 1

Blockchain is one of the most significant innovations of the last decade, given the ripple effect, it is having on different sectors, from financial to education. But what’s unknown to the broader public, the history of Blockchain started in the 1990s.

1991–2008: Early Years

How did Blockchain come to be? Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta envisioned the concept back in 1991. Their first attempt involved working on a cryptographically secured chain of blocks whereby no one could tamper with timestamps of documents.

In 1992, they improved their system with Merkle trees that enhanced efficiency, thereby enabling the collection of more documents on a single block. However, the real Blockchain history starts in 2008, thanks to the work one person or group by the name Satoshi Nakamoto.

Satoshi Nakamoto is marked as the brains behind blockchain technology. Almost nothing is known about Nakamoto as people believe he could be a person or a group of people that worked on Bitcoin, the first utilization of the digital ledger technology.

Nakamoto made the concept of the first Blockchain in 2008 from where the technology has evolved and found many different applications besides cryptocurrencies. Satoshi Nakamoto published the first whitepaper about the technology in 2009. In the whitepaper, he provided details of how technology could enhance digital trust through the decentralization.

At some point Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared from the scene and handed over Bitcoin development to other core developers. The digital ledger technology has evolved a lot since, resulting in new applications that make up the blockchain history.

2008–2013: Blockchain 1.0

Most people believe that Bitcoin and Blockchain are the same things. However, that is not the case, as one is the underlying technology that powers most applications of which one of them is cryptocurrencies.

Nakamoto formed the genesis block of Bitcoin’s Blockchain, from which other blocks were mined, resulting in one of the longest chains of blocks carrying pieces of information and storing transactions.

Ever since Blockchain hit the airwaves, many applications have been made, all of which seek to leverage the principles and capabilities of the digital ledger technology. Consequently, blockchain history contains a long list of applications that have evolved into being as the technology progressed.