1991 — Cryptographically secured chain of blocks

The blockchain technology was described in 1991 in an article about timestamping published by the
research scientist Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta. The article proposed a solution for preventing users
from backdating or forward-dating electronic documents. They develop a system using the concept of
cryptographically secured chain of blocks to store the time-stamped documents.

In 1992, Haber and Stornetta updated the design to incorporate Merkle trees, which enabled multiple
document certificates to live on a single block.

Merkle described an approach to public key distribution and digital signatures called "tree authentication"
in his 1979 Ph.D. thesis for Stanford University. He eventually patented this idea as a method for providing
digital signatures. The Merkle tree provides a data structure for verifying individual records.

Merkle Trees are used to create a 'secured chain of blocks.' Merkle tree, also known as hash tree, is a data
structure used for data verification and synchronization. It is a tree data structure where each non-leaf
node is a hash of it’s child nodes. It maintains data integrity and uses hash functions for this purpose.

It stored a series of data records, and each data records connected to the one before it. The newest record
in this chain contains the history of the entire chain.

The use of Merkle trees in blockchain technology is vital. Thanks to its use, the client software can
download the entire blockchain history and verify it. However, this technology went unused, and the
patent lapsed in 2004.

However, even before 1992 there was talk of blockchain, specifically by David Chaum. In 1982 David Chaum
David Chaum described a vault system for establishing, maintaining and trusting computer systems by
mutually suspicious groups in his Ph.D. dissertation, "Computer Systems Established, Maintained, and
Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups", for the University of California, Berkeley. This was a system that
embodied many of the elements that make up a blockchain. Chaum is also credited with inventing digital
cash, and in 1989, he founded the DigiCash corporation.

1997 – Adam Back: Hashcash

Adam Back introduced hashcash in 1997 to limit email spamming

1998 — Wei Dai

Wei Dai is a Chinese computer engineer and University of Washington alumnus who worked for the
Cryptography Research Group at Microsoft in the late 1990’s and early 2000's.

In 1998 he released an informal whitepaper titled “B-money, an anonymous, distributed electronic cash
system”, on his personal website WeiDai.com

Just like under Cynthia Dwork’s system, B-money requires a complex mathematical equation to be solved in
order to generate the value token implemented by the system. The value of one unit of B-money created is
equal to the cost of the computing time required to solve the equation. For example if the equation takes
100 hours of computing time to solve, and it takes $6000 to purchase 100 hours of computing time on the
open market, then the first person to find the solution is credited with $6000 worth of b-money.

1998 — Designed Bit-Gold (decentralized digital currency)

In 1998, a Computer scientist Nick Szabo designed a mechanism for a decentralized digital currency he
called "bit gold". Bit gold was never implemented, but has been called "a direct precursor to the Bitcoin
architecture.
In Szabo’s bit gold structure, a participant would dedicate computer power to solving cryptographic
puzzles. In a bit gold network, solved puzzles would be sent to the Byzantine fault-tolerant public registry
and assigned to the public key of the solver. Each solution would become part of the next challenge,
creating a growing chain of new property. This aspect of the system provided a way for the network to
verify and time-stamp new coins, because unless a majority of the parties agreed to accept new solutions,
they couldn’t start on the next puzzle.

When attempting to design transactions with a digital coin, you run into the "double-spending problem."
Once data have been created, reproducing them is a simple matter of copying and pasting. Most digital
currencies solve the problem by relinquishing some control to a central authority, which keeps track of
each account’s balance. This was an unacceptable solution for Szabo.

During these early years, there was plenty of other activity that also helped make blockchain possible. For
example, this era saw the rise of the P2P network, a concept popularized in 1999 by the now defunct
Napster. Some would argue that Napster was not a true P2P network because it used a centralized server.
However, the service still helped breathe life into the P2P network, making it possible to build a distributed
system that could benefit from the compute power and storage capacity of thousands of computers.

The concept of proof-of-work (PoW) was also introduced in this era to verify computational effort and
deter cyberattacks. This gave way to hashcash, a PoW algorithm that provides denial-of-service counter
measures.

2000 — Implementation idea for cryptographically secured chains

Stefan Konst published his theory of cryptographically secured chains, plus ideas for implementation. As
per this theory, the corners of any graph, according to the edges existing between them, are linked
together using cryptographic methods. This should not allow unauthorized persons to manipulate corners
unnoticed or to remove corners or edges unnoticed from the graph. The design specification for the
cryptographic chaining of the graph can be created in such a way that the graph and, correspondingly, its
cryptographic chaining can be expanded by further corners and edges.

In 2004, computer scientist and cryptographic activist Hal Finney introduced a system called Reusable Proof
Of Work(RPoW) as a prototype for digital cash. It was a significant early step in the history of
cryptocurrencies. The RPoW system worked by receiving a non-exchangeable or a non-fungible Hashcash
based proof of work token in return, created an RSA-signed token that further could be transferred from
person to person.

RPoW solved the double-spending problem by keeping the ownership of tokens registered on a trusted
server. This server was designed to allow users throughout the world to verify its correctness and integrity
in real-time.

2008 — Conceptualised Blockchain

The first blockchain was conceptualized by a person (or group of people) known as Satoshi Nakamoto in
2008. Nakamoto improved the design 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 with which
blocks are added to the chain.

2009 — Bitcoin implemented using blockchain technology

The design was implemented the following year by Nakamoto as a core component of the cryptocurrency
bitcoin a “purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash”. Where it serves as the public ledger for all
transactions on the network using bitcoin and that is how blockchain technology made its public debut in
2009.

2014 — Ethereum, smart contracts

Blockchain technology is separated from the currency and its potential for other financial, inter-
organizational transactions is explored. Blockchain 2.0 is born, referring to applications beyond currency.

The Ethereum blockchain system introduces computer programs into the blocks, representing financial
instruments such as bonds or smart contracts. Ethereum can be used for any industry. Ethereum was
initially described in a white paper in late 2013 by Vitalik Buterin a cryptocurrency researcher and
programmer. Development was funded by an online crowdsale that took place between July and August
2014.

This technology has attracted the attention of corporations such as Microsoft, BBVA, and UBS who are
intrigued by the potential of the smart contract functionality to save time and money.