History of Blockchain


Blockchain technology has to be one of the principal innovations of the 21stcentury assumed the ripple effect it is having on various sectors, from financial to manufacturing as well as education. Unknown to many, is that Blockchain history dates back to the early 1990’s. Since its popularity started increasing a few years back, a number of requests have cropped up all but underlining the kind of impact it is destined to have as the race for digital economies heat up.


How blockchain emerged?
Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta intended what many people have come to know as blockchain, in 1991. Their first work complex working on a cryptographically secured chain of blocks whereby no one could tamper with timestamps of documents. In 1992, they upgraded their system to incorporate Merkle trees that enhanced efficiency thereby enabling the collection of more documents on a single block. However, it is in 2008 that Blockchain History starts to gain relevance, thanks to the work one person or group by the name Satoshi Nakamoto.
Satoshi Nakamoto is accredited as the brains behind blockchain technology. Very little is known about Nakamoto as people believe he could be a person or a group of people that worked on Bitcoin, the first application of the digital ledger technology. Nakamoto conceptualized the first blockchain in 2008 from where the technology has evolved and found its way into many applications beyond cryptocurrencies. Satoshi Nakamoto released the first whitepaper about the technology in 2009. In the whitepaper, he provided details of how the technology was well equipped to enhance digital trust given the decentralization aspect that meant nobody would ever be in control of anything. Ever since Satoshi Nakamoto exited the scene and handed over Bitcoin development to other core developers, the digital ledger technology has evolved resulting in new applications that make up the blockchain History.

Structure of the blockchain:

In simple terms, Blockchain is a peer-to-peer distributed ledger that is secure and used to record transactions across many computers. The ledger’s contents can only be updated by adding another block linked to the previous block. It can also be envisioned as a peer-to-peer network running on top of the internet. In layman or businesses term, blockchain is a platform where people are allowed to carry out transactions of all sorts without the need for a central or trusted arbitrator. The created database is shared among network participants in a transparent manner, whereby everyone can access its contents. Management of the database is done autonomously using peer-to-peer networks and a time stamping server. Each block in a blockchain is arranged in such a way that it references the content of the previous block. The blocks that form a blockchain hold batches of transactions approved by participants in a network. Each block comes with a cryptographic hash of a previous block in the chain. Read more about what is blockchain.




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