Bitcoin: The birth of new technology (Article 1)
What exactly is a cryptocurrency? What is a blockchain?
These words are ubiquitous these days, however, thorough explanations of the terms often remain elusive. This drove me to write this article series, in which I will provide an accessible rundown from the start of cryptocurrency all the way up to the present day. The aim is to explain the major technical aspects and watershed moments in the development of Crypto-related technology, as well as the most salient economical and legal aspects related to Crypto-buzzwords in understandable terms.
The story — or, as some say, the revolution of Bitcoin — began in 2008 when an entity named Satoshi Nakamoto (it is at present unknown whether this is a single person or a group) published a whitepaper that described a new peer-to-peer payment system. What was unique about this proposed system was that it eliminated the need for a (trusted) third-party to ensure the trust between the sender and the receiver. Nakamoto gave this system, which functions as a blockchain, the name Bitcoin. The Bitcoin blockchain is a digital ledger (database) that consists of blocks that are tied together in chronological order, which leads to the formation of a chain. Each block includes some transactions and a link to its parent block. Every block can have only one parent block…
