We all know that the word blockchain was born together with Bitcoin in 2008. Although it was first proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto, blockchain technology was not entirely invented by Satoshi Nakamoto.
The core technology of blockchain includes four parts: cryptography, distributed storage, consensus mechanism, and smart contract. They have experienced 40 years of development before the current blockchain technology exists. The prototype of Cryptozoology all started in 1976, when the two masters of cryptography, Diffie and Herman, jointly published the paper "New Directions in Cryptozoology". The concepts mentioned in it are like treasures left by the gods in the new world. It laid the development direction of the entire cryptography today.
Countless technical geniuses began to explore this, and the famous RSA algorithm in cryptography was born the next year. This algorithm has not been broken to this day. Although it was a groundbreaking advancement at the time, cryptography was just getting started in the 1980s, 1980 and 1982. The data structure and corresponding algorithm of the hash tree, as well as the Byzantine Generals Problem, were successively proposed, marking that the theory of distributed computing has entered a substantive stage.
In 1985, the initial trial of the elliptic curve encryption algorithm made it possible for the asymmetric encryption system to be practical, and it was only then that the foundation of modern cryptography was completely established. The next time, 1997, is an extremely important year, because the remaining two core technologies will appear at the same time. In 1997, the concept of smart contracts was proposed. In the same year, the first generation of smart contract mechanism POW came out. At that time, POW was the main It is also used for anti-spam. The four core technologies of the blockchain are basically assembled, but there are still many problems that have not been solved.
In the three years from 1999 to 2001, P2P network computing developed rapidly. The emergence of NapsterEDonkey2000 and BitTorrent laid the foundation for P2P network computing. In addition, another important thing in 2001 was The SHA-2 series of algorithms was born, and this set of algorithms was initially used in the Bitcoin blockchain system.
As a result, the core technology accumulation of blockchain has been basically completed. Whether in theory or practice, there are no longer major bottlenecks in the implementation of blockchain. Finally in 2008. Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin, the first peer-to-peer electronic wire system paper, established the blockchain technology, and it was successfully implemented the following year, announcing that a new era was coming.