Blockchain history review
1. Prehistoric record "1976"
1976, Bailey w. Diffie and Martin e. Hellman two masters of cryptography has published a paper "a new direction of cryptography, paper covers in the coming decades all the new progress in field of cryptography, including asymmetric encryption, elliptic curve algorithm, some means such as hash, laid so far the development direction of cryptography, also to block chain technology and the birth of COINS play a decisive role.
In the same year, hayek published his last book on economics, the denationalization of money.Anyone who has a certain understanding of bitcoin knows that the non-sovereign currency, competitive issuance currency and other concepts proposed by the non-state of the currency, or the spiritual guide to decentralized currency.
Therefore, I personally regard 1976 as the first year of the prehistoric era of blockchain, which officially started the whole era of cryptography, including cryptocurrency.
This was followed in 1977 by the creation of the famous RSA algorithm, a natural continuation of the 1976 new direction in cryptography, for which the three inventors won the Turing prize in 2002.However, the patents they applied for RSA, in a world where it is generally accepted that algorithms cannot be patented, were not widely acknowledged and expired early in 2000.
In 1980, Merkle Ralf proposed the Merkle Tree data structure and the corresponding algorithm. One of the main USES later is to verify the correctness of data synchronization in the distributed network, which is also an important means for the introduction of bitcoin to do block synchronization verification.It is worth pointing out that in 1980, the really popular hash algorithm, distributed network has not yet appeared, for example: we are familiar with sha-1, MD5 such things were born in the 1990s.Merkle released such a data structure in those days, and it is somewhat surprising that it would play an important role in the field of cryptography and distributed computing.But if you know Merkle's background, this is no accident: he's a PhD student at diffifie, one of the co-authors of a new direction in cryptography (Hellman's research assistant), and in fact a new direction in cryptography is the research interest of a PhD student at Merkle Ralf.Merkle, it is said, was actually one of the lead authors of a new direction in cryptography. Only because he was a doctoral student at the time and did not receive an invitation to the conference where the paper was published, did he fail to sign his name on the paper, thus missing out on the Turing prize 40 years later.
In 1982, Lamport raised the issue of general Byzantine, marking that the reliability theory and practice of distributed computing have entered a substantive stage.In the same year, David chum proposed the cryptographic payment system ECash. It can be seen that with the development of cryptography, people with keen vision have started to try to apply it to the fields related to currency and payment. It should be said that ECash is one of the earliest pioneers of cryptographic currency.In 1985, Koblitz and Miller independently proposed the well-known elliptic curve encryption (ECC) algorithm.Because the algorithm of RSA invented before is too large to be practical, the proposal of ECC makes the asymmetric encryption system practical.Therefore, it can be said that by 1985, about 10 years after the publication of the new direction of cryptography, the theoretical and technical basis of modern cryptography had been completely established.
Interestingly, the period 1985-1997 saw no particularly significant advances in cryptography, distributed networks, and relationships with areas such as payment/currency.In the author's opinion, this phenomenon is easy to understand: at the beginning of new ideas, concepts and technologies, there is always a long time for everyone to learn, explore and practice, and then breakthrough achievements are possible.The first ten years are usually the development of theories, while the last ten years are the stage of practical exploration. The period from 1985 to 1997 should be the stage of rapid development of relevant fields in practice.Finally, beginning in 1976, after about 20 years, the field of cryptography and distributed computing finally entered the explosive period.
In 1997, the HashCash method, known as the first generation of POW (Proof of Work) algorithm appeared, was invented mainly for anti-spam.In various subsequent papers, the specific algorithm design and implementation has completely covered the POW mechanism used by later bitcoin.
In 1998, the complete idea of cryptocurrency was finally emerged. Wei Dai and Nick saab put forward the concept of cryptocurrency at the same time.Among them, dai wei's b-money is called the spiritual pioneer of bitcoin, while Nick saab's Bitgold outline and satoshi nakamoto's bitcoin paper list the characteristics so closely that some people once suspected that saab was satoshi nakamoto.Interestingly, it was a full decade before the creation of bitcoin.
Each age bring forth new genius on this noble land, each will rule its own domain for years to come.
At the turn of the 21st century, there have been several significant developments in the blockchain-related field: first, peer-to-peer distributed networks. In the three years from 1999 to 2001, Napster, EDonkey 2000 and BitTorrent appeared successively, which laid the foundation for P2P network computing.
In 2001, another important thing was that the NSA released the sha-2 series of algorithms, including the sha-256 algorithm, which is currently the most widely used algorithm, and is the final hashing algorithm adopted by bitcoin.It should be said that in 2001, all the technical basis for the birth of bitcoin or blockchain technology has been solved in theory and practice, and bitcoin is ready to come out.
In the history of mankind, we often see such a phenomenon. It takes about 30 years for an idea or technology to be put forward and then carry forward.This phenomenon is not only in the field of technology, but also in other fields such as philosophy, natural science and mathematics. The generation and development of blockchain also follow this pattern.This model is also very easy to understand, because after an idea, an algorithm, a technology is born, to be digestion, exploration, practice, probably take a generation.
2. Satoshi Nakamoto
Nakamoto published his famous paper "bitcoin: peer-to-peer electronic cash system" in November 2008, and in January 2009 he used The first version of his software to find The founding block, which contained The words "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second ubiquforbanks."Those of you who know the history of bitcoin are probably more familiar than I am.For the development process of bitcoin, there are several important time nodes:
In September 2010, the first mine, Slush, created a multi-node cooperative mining method, which became the beginning of the bitcoin mining industry.Before that, in May 2010, 10,000 bitcoins were worth only $25. At that price, the entire bitcoin ($21 million) would be worth $50,000.So the decision to set up the pool means that it is surely far-sighted to assume that bitcoin will become some sort of virtual currency that can be exchanged for real-world currencies with unlimited room for growth.
In April 2011, the currency in formal record of the official (https://bitcoin.org/en/version-history) in the first version: 0.3.21 release, this version is very junior, however, is of great significance.First of all, thanks to its support for uPNP and its realization of the capability of P2P software we use every day, bitcoin can enter the home of ordinary people and allow anyone to participate in transactions.Second, before that, the smallest unit of bitcoin node only supported 0.01 bitcoin, which was equivalent to "cent", while this version actually supported "cong".Arguably, it was only after this version that bitcoin became what it is today, truly becoming a market, and before that it was basically a tech plaything.
“Code is not the law，but good software is good”
In 2013, bitcoin released the 0.8 version, which is the most important version in the history of bitcoin. It improves the internal management of the whole bitcoin node itself and the optimization of network communication.It was only after this point in time that bitcoin truly supported large-scale transactions across the network and became the electronic cash envisioned by satoshi nakamoto, making a real global impact.
Things are not always smooth sailing. In the most important version, 0.8, bitcoin introduced a big bug, so after the release of this version, there was a hard fork in bitcoin for a short time, resulting in the whole bitcoin had to be retreated to the old version at last, which also led to a sharp drop in the price of bitcoin.
More and more people are familiar with the development of bitcoin. For example, the attitudes towards bitcoin and the growth of computing power in the world, which reached 1EH/S in January 2016 and more than 10,000 relevant open source projects on Github, all prove that the bitcoin ecological environment has been fully mature.
Looking at the history of bitcoin from these perspectives, you might share my feeling that, no matter how powerful nakamoto's curse, digital/cryptocurrency is promising, it depends on the evolution of the software itself bit by bit.If the software itself is fatally buggy, eventually the whole system becomes meaningless.Now you can see more and more virtual currencies, a variety of ICO, I hope to give you the message is, at least to look at their software level, otherwise it is not much different from a ponzi scheme - good software, is really good.
3.ETH
" blockchain 2.0, the computer of the world"
Vitalik Buterin was the founder and inventor of ethereum. This Russian guy had been doing development and news reports in the field of bitcoin for a long time, and finally developed ethereum independently.His story is like a young man in order to learn matchless martial arts, joined the noble family decent, painstaking cultivation for many years, finally came out to create their own martial arts, hoping to unify the rivers and lakes, thousands of generations.
The development course of itafang is limited by time and will not be introduced in detail. However, just as the story above says, what itafang embodies from the very beginning is the ambitious and deliberate design, which seems to become the system architecture that unifies rivers and lakes and thousands of generations.It feels a little like the popular fantasy novels of previous years, which designed an aerial world and then expanded the story: from the earliest paper of EVM definition, to ICO, to POC version one by one, finally to the Frontier stage released in July 2015, and finally to the Homestead version released in March 2016.It is expected that a version of Metropolis will be released this year, which is also the last version of POW. From this point of view, the price of ether coin may rise sharply, although this is not the focus of our attention.
The goal of ethereum's design is blockchain 2.0, a globally distributed computer with a perfect roadmap and system architecture.It remains to be seen, of course, whether it will ultimately achieve its design goals.
4.The sea is turbulent
After the gradual maturity of bitcoin, the concept of cryptocurrency has been gradually recognized and accepted by people.Blockchain is also making its mark as a technology.In the years since 2011, digital currencies such as litecoin, Ripple and R3 and blockchain technologies have emerged in competition.At the same time, Germany officially recognized bitcoin, nasdaq completed transactions through its own blockchain platform, and although the people's bank of China denied the status of bitcoin, it was the only bank in the world that immediately announced to make its own cryptocurrency/digital currency.According to statistics, by April this year, 455 blockchain companies around the world have received nearly $2 billion of investment, including 61 in China.In general, driven by some giants like bitcoin and ethereum, the world has started a boom in digital currency and blockchain, which is to some extent the main reason for CSDN to hold the first blockchain summit this year.
"The era of blockchain navigation"
A simple timeline is no longer enough to describe the general picture of this new era, so I divide the analysis of blockchain into four dimensions: technology, industry, government and society.
From the perspective of technology, in the era of blockchain, ethereum, Corda and ZCash have been merged, and the consensus mechanism of blockchain technology is becoming more and more mature, and there are many schools and categories.At the same time, it can be seen that the global computing power of bitcoin has now reached 4 EH/S, which shows that digital currency and blockchain technology have entered the era of rapid growth.From the perspective of the industry, there have been successful cases of POC in more than a dozen fields around the world, including bills, securities, insurance, supply chain, certificate keeping, source tracing and intellectual property, some of which have entered the practice stage.Not only independent developers, but also a number of large domestic and international financial institutions, Banks and traditional enterprises have also established their own blockchain projects. Whether they conduct their own research and development or cooperate with a third party, it proves that the application of blockchain technology in the industry is also a hot trend.
From the government's perspective, in the case of bitcoin alone, more than a dozen countries around the world recognize that it has the status of a currency or similar currency that can be traded and circulated.Our country's central bank, although it banned the circulation of bitcoin, but very aggressive announced that they want to do digital currency.A few days ago, under the guidance of the ministry of industry and information technology, the technical reference architecture of blockchain distributed ledger was also released, which also proves that the government's attitude towards blockchain is still very supportive.
From the perspective of society, we have to talk about the economic figures: at the time of preliminary statistics in 2016, there were 656 kinds of digital currencies around the world, which are still known as shanzhai COINS.I believe that a lot of people who care about digital currency will certainly pay attention to their various ICO activities.As of April this year, the total market value of digital currencies is over 30 billion us dollars. There is a website dedicated to real-time reflection of its data. I had a look yesterday afternoon, and the total market value is over 29 billion us dollars.Since some payment institutions can accept bitcoin payment, it can actually indirectly reach thousands of merchants around the world (although this is a concept preferred by consultants).Google academic academic papers related to blockchain have almost reached 20,000. From this perspective, it can also be seen that the technology of blockchain is no longer a technology attached to bitcoin, ethereum, or any digital currency, but is really incorporated into the academic research field as an independent technology.