History of blockchain
Blockchain technology is known to be the greatest invention of the 21st century. It has seen its major and everlasting effects on various sectors such as financial, manufacturing and even the education department. Blockchain origin dates back to the era of the 1990s. Blockchain was not very popular until the past few years, in which it has changed the concept of digital currency and its usage.
Decentralization is one of the main features of this technology. It removes the involvement of third or any other party for the addition of the blocks in blockchain technology. This also eliminates all the problems regarding fraud and theft in society and provides a transparent and clean exchange solution all over the globe. Decentralization is a revolutionary innovation in the field of technology and exchange.
Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta in 1911 were the pioneers who presented the first work of cryptographically arranged blockchains. They were working on the tempering of the document timestamps. Bayer, Haber and Stornetta introduced the new feature of Merkle tree in blockchain design which allows incorporating many documents at the same time in a block.
In 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto gave the concept of the first blockchain. One of the biggest achievements was done by this great man. This man is considered the brain behind the development of this technology. He devised a method known as Hash-cash like which removes the restriction on the addition of blocks to the blockchain with the consent of a trusted party. In the following year, this feature was introduced in the core currency Bitcoin of blockchain, which served as a public ledger. Bitcoin is a viable alternative to the fiat currency, which was used before the advent of cryptocurrency in the industry. Bitcoin is a decentralized global currency which can be used for exchange purpose. In 2014 the Bitcoin size was 20 GB. Bitcoin contained records of all transactions. In 2015 this size increased to 30 GB and between 2016 to 2017 the size was doubled from 50 Gb to 100 GB (gigabytes). Satoshi Nakamoto used to block and chain separately in his paper, but from 2016 this term was used as the blockchain.
Blockchain Vs. Bitcoin
Many people think that blockchain technology and Bitcoin are the same terms, but this is not the case here. In 2008 Satoshi introduced the Bitcoin in blockchain technology. So, technically these both are different terms. Due to Bitcoin, an unlimited number of applications are introduced in the blockchain technology. IBM opened a research center for the growth and development of blockchain technology in Singapore in 2016. World economic forum people met in 2016 to discuss the latest advancements in the Bitcoin and its transactions around the globe. Decentralization is the feature which makes blockchain technology different among the other technologies in the industry and due to this, every industry is considering it for their workload.
2016 was an early adopters’ phase for digital currency. In this year, this currency reached the 13.5% adoption rate in 2016, according to Accenture. This hype was all due to the diffusion of innovations theory. Moreover, due to a combined effort of different working groups, Global blockchain forum was designed in 2016.
Era of Ethereum
In 2013 Vitalik Buterin was one of the many growing developers who have reached to the verdict that Bitcoin is not gaining its full potential and is showing its fewer capabilities. He is known as the first contributor to the Bitcoin database. He was deeply concerned by the limitations of Bitcoin and started working on a new cryptocurrency which can have new features along with the peer-peer transactions. In 2013 Ethereum was born as a new blockchain technology which has a number of new features when compared with Bitcoin and changed the history of Blockchain technology.
Ethereum was different from Bitcoin as it can record slogans and contracts in it, unlike Bitcoin. This made Ethereum a new platform for developing a decentralized application in the world of blockchain technology. Ethereum was officially launched in 2015 which made the ecosystem a more compact and a digitalized world for everyone to live in it. Ethereum is at one of the biggest caps in the cryptocurrency sales.
NEO development
Recently a new cryptocurrency known as NEO has been introduced by China, which is a decentralized and an open platform for blockchain technology. Even though China has banned the cryptocurrency and its trade, but innovations and research are still going on at this new cryptocurrency in the global market. This is known as the third era of blockchain technology.
Another great achievement was shifting from proof of work mining to proof of stake mining. Both costs and energy consumption issues are improved in the proof of stake mining. From 2013 to 2018 there is a steady increase in the graph for the purchase of cryptocurrency.
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