To Understand Blockchains, You Should Understand Cryptographic Hashes First

Bitcoin is first and foremost a child of cryptography

For me, the key to grasping blockchains is understanding cryptographic hashes. I think a lot of us normies make the mistake of conceiving of blockchains as basically lists of anonymous transactions distributed across decentralized networks. While this is indeed what a single blockchain is, what sometimes gets lost is that the foundation of blockchain technology lies not in decentralization, anonymity, or even distributed ledgers, but in cryptography itself. While this may be obvious to anyone with a basic understanding of computer science, for most of us it is entirely new.

Ultra Brief History of Digital Money

Bitcoin is a new take on previous experiments with digital money. In the 1990s, this was a hot, albeit speculative, topic. Even Alan Greenpsan said during a speech in 1996,

“We could envisage proposals in the near future for the issuers of electronic payment obligations, such as stored-value cards or ‘digital cash,’ to set up specialized issuing corporations with strong balance sheets and public credit ratings.”

Establishment use of digital currency was thus on the table well before Bitcoin. To…