The First Blockchain in the World

In 1991, the two researchers Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta conducted basic research on the cryptographic concatenation of individual transaction blocks. That was 17 years before the release of the Bitcoin White Paper by Satoshi Nakomoto. In their work "How to time-stamp a digital document" they dealt with the problem of authorship in the age of digitization:

"The prospect of a world where all text, audio, video and video documents are digitally presented on easily changeable media raises the question of how to confirm when a document was created or last modified. The problem is that the data and not the medium need to be time-stamped ",

it says in the abstract of the work.

The digital fingerprint

In their introduction, Haber and Stornetta illustrate their approach with an example:

"A recognized method of timestamping a scientific idea is to take daily notes about one's own work in a lab notebook. The dated entries are entered one after the other in the notebook, with no page left blank. The notebook's sequentially numbered, sewn pages make it difficult to manipulate the data set without leaving telltale marks. If the notebook is then regularly stamped by a notary or checked and signed by a managing director, the validity of the claim will be further increased. "

Already here one recognizes some characteristics of what later became known as "blockchain": The complete traceability of entries, the resistance to tampering and the increasing validity through a continuous review of the book by an independent party.

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