OKX Blockchain 60 Lessons | Episode 10: The Birth of Blockchain Technology

"OKX Blockchain 60 Lessons" is a blockchain education animation series jointly produced by OKX and Sina Tech. Designed for users with zero prior knowledge of blockchain, it uses articles and animated videos to vividly explain blockchain concepts through five major sections covering 60 key topics—from concepts and technology to applications. The content of this episode was guided by Shao Jianliang, General Manager of Blockchain at Canaan Creative.

Hello everyone, this is Xiao K. Today we'll be discussing: "The Birth of Blockchain Technology." As we all know, the term blockchain was born alongside Bitcoin in 2008. Although it was first introduced by Nakamoto, blockchain technology was not entirely invented by Nakamoto.

The core technologies of blockchain consist of four components: cryptography, distributed storage, consensus mechanism, and smart contracts. These took 40 years of development before the blockchain technology we know today took shape.

It all began in 1976, when two cryptography pioneers, Diffie and Hellman, co-published the paper "New Directions in Cryptography." The concepts presented in the paper outlined new areas of advancement in cryptography for decades to come, laying the foundation for the entire direction of modern cryptography—like a treasure left behind by the gods in a new world, inspiring countless technical talents to begin their exploration.

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The following year, 1977, the renowned RSA algorithm in cryptography was proposed by Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman. This is an asymmetric encryption algorithm, and to this day, no reliable method of attacking RSA has been discovered in the world. Although it validated the feasibility of "New Directions in Cryptography" at the time, cryptography was only just beginning.

In the 1980s, specifically in 1980, Ralph Merkle proposed the hash tree data structure along with its corresponding algorithms, used to verify the correctness of data synchronization in distributed networks—laying an important foundation for Bitcoin's distributed ledger. In 1982, Lamport proposed the Byzantine Generals Problem, a fundamental issue in peer-to-peer communication, marking the point at which the theory and practice of distributed computing reliability entered a substantive stage.

In 1985, Koblitz and Miller independently proposed elliptic curve cryptography. The previous RSA algorithm required excessive computational resources, making it difficult to apply in practice. The emergence of elliptic curve cryptography provided a viable alternative to RSA, making practical asymmetric encryption systems possible—and thus the foundations of modern cryptography were fully established.

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In the years that followed, 1997 proved to be an extremely important year, as the two remaining core technologies would debut simultaneously. In 1997, the concept of smart contracts was proposed, and in the same year, the first generation of consensus mechanism—PoW—was introduced, primarily used for combating spam at the time. With this, the four core technologies of blockchain were essentially in place, though many issues remained unresolved.

It wasn't until the three years from 1999 to 2001 that P2P network computing experienced rapid development. The emergence of Napster, eDonkey 2000, and BitTorrent in succession laid the foundation for P2P network computing. Additionally, in 2001, another significant event occurred: the SHA-2 family of algorithms was created. Bitcoin's blockchain system adopted this very algorithm from the start, and with this, the core technology foundation for blockchain was essentially complete. Both in theory and in practice, there were no longer major obstacles to blockchain implementation.

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Ultimately, in 2008, Nakamoto's paper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" formally established blockchain technology, which was successfully implemented the following year, heralding the arrival of an entirely new era.

Special thanks to Teacher Shao Jianliang for his assistance and guidance on the content of this episode.

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