History of Blockchain Part 1: Adam Smith (1776)

By Gregory Snelgar on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

Gregory Snelgar
The Dark Side
Published in
8 min readNov 2, 2018

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Adam Smith sat for this portrait in 1787, sculpted by James Tassie.

About this Series

In 2008, at the height of the financial crisis and the meltdown of the global economy, something very special happened. Satoshi Nakamoto had discovered a way to guarantee trust between people anonymously across the internet. Just like Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection or Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, it was an idea with almost magical properties with the revolutionary potential to change everything. And just like those other ideas, few people can claim to fully understand it. It may in fact be simpler just to accept blockchain as magic rather than try to understand scientifically how all the pieces fit together, but for those up to that challenge, this series will clearly explain each puzzle piece in chronological order.

Blockchain is a bewildering, multifaceted abstract concept; but each of these chapters will focus on a tangible historical person and the relatively simple contribution they made; thereby providing a series of mental anchors which can finally be brought together to achieve true comprehension.

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Gregory Snelgar
The Dark Side

Writer at Altcoin Magazine. Crypto-economic analyst for the Arium 2.0 project, an Ethereum dapp which enables automatic and free international commerce.