1979
The Merkle tree, so named in honor of mathematician and computer scientist Ralph Merkle, is one of the earliest pre-blockchain technologies. In his Stanford University doctoral thesis, he presented a method for digital signatures and public key distribution known as tree authentication. In the end, Merkle patented this concept as a way to offer digital signatures. An individual record verification data structure is offered by the Merkle tree.
1982
David Chaum described a vault system in his doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley. It is intended to let mutually suspicious groups construct, maintain, and trust computer systems. This system had most of the components that make up a blockchain. In addition, Chaum founded DigiCash in 1989 and is credited with creating digital currency.
1991
To stop users from backdating or forward-dating electronic documents, Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta released a guide on timestamping digital documents. The intention was to preserve the document’s total confidentiality without necessitating the retention of records by a timestamping service. Merkle trees were added to the architecture by Haber and Stornetta, allowing several document certificates to coexist on a single block.
1993
In an article by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor, the original ideas behind the PoW concept were presented as “a computational technique for combatting junk mail, in particular, and controlling access to a shared resource, in general.”
1997
Hashcash, a Proof-of-Work algorithm with denial-of-service defenses, was introduced by Adam Black.
To be continued…..:)
