The History of Blockchain

Blockchain is a decentralized ledger tracking of one or more digital assets on a peer-to-peer network.^[1]

The History

 The concept of a “block and chain” has been around since the early 1990s. Like many developments in human history, it has taken time to marinate and develop into innovative technologies.

• 1991 - Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta authored a paper titled “How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document.”
• 1994 - American computer scientist Nick Szabo coined the term “Smart Contract”. ^[2]
• 1997 - Tim May proposed a type of digital money based on a ‘remailers’ system that forwarded messages with anonymity.
• 2002 - David Mazineres and Dennis Shaha proposed a way to build a trusted file system on an untrusted server.
• 2008 - Satoshi Nakomoto wrote the Bitcoin whitepaper that combined these concepts, creating a system of online transactions using a peer-to-peer trustless network.
• 2010 (May) - Laszlo Hanyecz made the first-world bitcoin transaction. He paid 10,000 BTC for two large Papa John’s pizzas or the equivalent of $25.00.
• 2012 - Bitcoin blockchain evolved to offer another type of smart contract called a multi-signature transaction.
• 2013 (May) - the first large market rally and subsequent crash happened in a volatile cryptocurrency market. Prices rose from $13 to $220 and then dropped to $70.
• 2013 (November) - Bitcoin broke $1000 per coin.
• 2015 (April) - NASDAQ initiated the first Blockchain trial to test speeding up transactions. They later evaluated blockchain for margin calls and added in voting for shareholders.
• 2018 (January) - Switzerland began accepting tax payments in Bitcoin. At this point in time, 80% of all available Bitcoin had been mined, and demand for it started to increase.
• 2018 Companies like Baidu and Flur.ee offered Blockchain as a Service Platform.
• 2019 Walmart launched a supply chain system based on the Hyperledger platform. Additionally, Amazon announced “Amazon Managed Blockchain” service on AWS.

 Since its inception twelve years ago, Blockchain is now very much mainstream, and many companies are finding that the speed of its use and functionality provides the opportunity to increase speed and value for their customers all over the globe.

 As you can see, Blockchain is an ideal transactional business model, that when deployed correctly is both secure and functional.

Looking ahead

 In my next post, I will present evidence of emerging markets using Blockchain, explore new uses of the technology as well as identify and contrast the pros and cons of the Blockchain ecosystem.

Resources:

^[1] https://www.blockchain-council.org/blockchain/blockchain-role-of-p2p-network/

^[2] “a computerized transaction protocol that executes the terms of a contract,” with general objectives to “satisfy common contractual conditions, minimize exceptions both malicious and accidental, and minimize the need for trusted intermediaries.”