The Birth of a Blockchain

We don’t know who coined the name “blockchain” but we know Satoshi Nakamoto used “the chain of blocks” in his 2008 Bitcoin white paper. Bitcoin is the first successful global implementation of blockchain, but Satoshi is not the inventor of the concept of blockchain. The concept of blockchain was first appeared in the paper “How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document” by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta in 1991.

Drs. Haber and Stornetta wanted to provide a Time Stamp Service (TSS) for any individual or company to timestamp the electric files, which could be text documents, images or videos. Then they need to solve the following problems:

1. TSS needs to have a huge storage for all clients’ files.
2. TSS needs to make sure the files wouldn’t be tampered or corrupted over a long period of time.
3. How to prove the time in TSS is correct ?

Their solution is to only store the hash of the electric file, not the original file. No matter what the size of the file, TSS only needs to store the 256 bit hash of the a file. The hash can be printed or make multiple copies to avoid data loss or corruption. Finally, for the 3rd problem, Drs. Haber and Stornetta called it “who will guard the guards themselves?” They proposed to add the previous hash to the current file, and generate a new hash, and then add the new hash to the next file. In this situation, the time cannot be tempered unless all subsequent hashes are changed.

Although they didn’t call this idea a blockchain, it is indeed the birth of a blockchain.