No question: Bitcoin brought blockchain technology to the financial floor. “Blockchain” has become a tech buzzword at the latest since BTC and the numerous Altcoins shook up the investment landscape. It is decentralized, transparent and sometimes consumes a lot of energy. But who actually came up with it?
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The invention of the blockchain
It is true that Satoshi Nakamoto created an important application for blockchain technology with Bitcoin in 2008. In fact, the system came into being years earlier. Because in 1991, Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta programmed the first software that was already very similar to today’s blockchain. This programming was preceded by their white paper entitled “How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document”.
In this paper they described a method for generating and verifying timestamps for digital documents. Their approach was based on cryptographic hash functions and was considered one of the earliest precursors to blockchain technology.
Haber and Stornetta recognized the importance of the decentralized storage of information and the manipulation-proof concatenation of data blocks. Although their system did not have the exact characteristics of a blockchain, their work was seminal for the later development of this technology.
In 1992 they added Merkle trees to their system, which are still used in today’s blockchains. They make it possible to go beyond the singular storage of data. In 1994 Haber and Stornetta founded the company “Surety” and released their software “AbsoluteProof”.
The beginnings of Proof of Work
In order to solve the double spend problem – the risk of coins being spent twice – Hal Finney developed the “Reusable Proofs of Work” system in 2004. This was a precursor to the later “Proof of Work” mechanism invented by Satoshi Nakamoto and used today on the Bitcoin blockchain. However, Hal Finney’s approach still relied on central servers to verify the correctness of transactions.
Most likely, Satoshi Nakamoto had access to all of this information and built upon it the blockchain as we know it today, published in the 2008 white paper “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”.
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