We all know that the term "blockchain" emerged in 2008 alongside Bitcoin. Although it was first proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto, blockchain technology was not entirely invented by Nakamoto.
The core technologies of blockchain include cryptography, distributed storage, consensus mechanisms, and smart contracts. These technologies underwent 40 years of development before forming the foundation of today's blockchain.
It all began in 1976 when two cryptography pioneers, Diffie and Hellman, co-authored the paper New Directions in Cryptography. The concepts introduced in this paper outlined new advancements in cryptography over the following decades and laid the groundwork for the entire field of modern cryptography. Like treasures left behind by gods in a new world, countless technological geniuses began exploring these ideas.
The following year, the famous RSA algorithm was introduced by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman. This asymmetric encryption algorithm remains unbroken to this day. While it indirectly validated the feasibility of New Directions in Cryptography, cryptography was only just beginning.
By the 1980s, in 1980, Ralph Merkle proposed the hash tree data structure and its corresponding algorithm to verify data synchronization in distributed networks, laying a crucial foundation for Bitcoin's distributed ledger. In 1982, Lamport introduced the Byzantine Generals Problem, a fundamental issue in peer-to-peer communication, marking a significant milestone in the theory and practice of distributed computing reliability.
In 1985, Koblitz and Miller independently proposed elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). The computational complexity of RSA made it impractical for many applications, but ECC provided a viable alternative, making asymmetric encryption practical. With this, the foundation of modern cryptography was firmly established.
Later, 1997 became a pivotal year as the remaining two core technologies emerged simultaneously: the concept of smart contracts was introduced, and the first-generation consensus mechanism, Proof of Work (PoW), was unveiled—initially used mainly for spam prevention. At this point, the four core technologies of blockchain were nearly complete, though many challenges remained unresolved.
From 1999 to 2001, P2P networking advanced rapidly with the emergence of Napster, EDonkey 2000, and BitTorrent, establishing the foundation for P2P computing. Additionally, in 2001, the SHA-2 series of algorithms was introduced. Bitcoin's blockchain initially adopted this algorithm, marking the near-completion of blockchain's core technological development. Whether in theory or practice, the implementation of blockchain no longer faced major obstacles.
Finally, in 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto's paper Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System formally established blockchain technology, which was successfully implemented the following year, heralding the dawn of a new era.
