1979The 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…
2008Thought to be a pseudonym used by a single person or group of people, Satoshi Nakamoto contributed to the creation of the original Bitcoin software and released a white paper outlining the idea of cryptocurrencies and blockchain. The white paper states that blockchain technology would enable safe peer-to-peer transactions without requiring the involvement of governments…
What is blockchain ? Blockchain is a kind of database that records transactions in a public ledger without requiring verification from a third party. Distributed on a peer-to-peer network, it is made up of data chunks that are joined to create an unbroken chain of unchangeable records. To prevent a single point of failure, every…
Why and how to make your first blockchain part II ? Blockchain’s journey has been turbulent since 2009, driven by the rise of erratic cryptocurrencies, but the technology has far deeper roots and a wider range of uses than Bitcoin.Still, for better or worse, most people associate blockchain with Bitcoin. Following Bitcoin’s launch, the blockchain…
The first decentralized blockchain was conceptualized by a person (or group of people) known as Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. Nakamoto improved the design in an important way using a Hashcash-like method to timestamp blocks without requiring them to be signed by a trusted party and introducing a difficulty parameter to stabilize the rate at which blocks are added to the…