The world’s first digital currency, Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) has been the harbinger of a new financial order with the potential to survive any crisis if history is to be believed.
Originally described in 1991 by the research scientist Stuart Haber and cryptographer W. Scott Stornetta, the earliest version of blockchain technology was designed so as to introduce a computationally practical solution for time-stamping digital documents that could not be tampered with.
While this version underwent some modifications with the incorporation of Merkle Trees, the technology was never used and subsequently led to the patent getting lapsed in 2004.
Satoshi Nakamoto Publishes The Whitepaper
A few years later in October 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto – credited as being the founder of BTC, published a white paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” to outline how online payments can be facilitated without having to rely on financial institutions for transaction purposes and truly introduced blockchain technology to the world.
Further, the proposed solution aimed at avoiding the double-spending problem by adopting a consensus mechanism known as proof-of-work (PoW) and doing away with the need for privately verifying every transaction, as is done by trusted third parties such as banks in the traditional financial world.
Employing a network of computers to validate transactions, timestamp them and record them in the form of blocks that cannot be altered once created, this paper marked the genesis of BTC, the world’s first cryptocurrency, which …
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