The origin of blockchain platforms

We’ve heard of digital cash. But what more can blockchains do?

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Blockchain, not just for digital cash

The first and most obvious blockchain application was Bitcoin — digital cash. But actually, this is a blockchain’s most primitive form. As Ethereum showed the world, there’s a lot more blockchains can do. In this article, we’ll explore how platforms like Ethereum came to be, and what they can be used for.

Let’s look at some different blockchain projects before Ethereum came along. There were 3 big ones : namecoin, colored coins and metacoins.

• Namecoin is a decentralized name registration database, created in 2010. It was the first fork of Bitcoin. In decentralized protocols (BitMessage, Bitcoin, Tor), there were often difficulties in identifying some accounts so that other people could interact with them. If you’ve ever used Tor, think of those random .onion domain names that don’t make sense at all. The only way someone could be identified was by a hash-function, which is an address/key. Namecoin wanted to solve this problem by providing a service that would let you attach some data, in this case — a name, to a specific address. Ownership of a name is associated with ownership of a coin which, like a bitcoin, is censorship-resistant, since…