HISTORY OF THE BLOCKCHAIN(1991)

In 1991, Dr W. Scott Stornetta and his co-author Dr Stuart Haber published a whitepaper introducing ‘blockchain’, a decentralised, cryptic database where digital transactions are Secured.

The journey of Blockchain started in 1991 A structure which was similar to that of Blockchain was mentioned in a research paper titled “How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document” in 1991 by Haber and Stornetta.

According to that paper, a client sends a document to timestamp to a timestamping server and the server would sign the document with the current timestamp. Also, the server would link the document to the previous document. The pointers pointed to specific data and not the location of the document. So if the data changed, the pointer would become invalid. It ensured no one could tamper the data that had once passed through the server.

According to this paper what was needed was a method of time-stamping digital documents with the following two properties

1. Finding a way for automated time-stamping, without any reliance on the characteristics of the medium on which the data appears, so that it is impossible to change even one bit of the document without the change being apparent.

2. It should be impossible to stamp a document with a time and date different from the actual one.

Next and definitely the most important innovation leading to Blockchain was the Bitcoin. In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published a white-paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System”. The paper claimed that it had a solution to the double spending problem in digital currency using a peer-to-peer network. The main aim of the paper was to build a peer-to-peer version of digital currency that would enable people to spend it directly without it going in a financial institution. It was a huge innovation that enabled the user to transact directly without relying on a third party.