Contrary to the belief of many, Bitcoin is not the oldest blockchain. Its place in the history of money and money is that it is the first blockchain to transfer value peer-to-peer without the aid or participation of any intermediary.
Corollary to this is the fact that Satoshi Nakamoto is not the inventor of blockchain technology. His greatest contribution is solving the problem that has always baffled cryptographers before him: how to transfer value peer-to-peer and securely.
So you may ask, what is the oldest blockchain and who invented it?
Blockchain technology was invented by the cryptographers Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta in 1991 not for the purpose of transferring value but as a way to timestamp digital documents to verify their authenticity.
The oldest blockchain predates Bitcoin by 13 years and it is still working until now. It is called Surety, the time-stamping service that has been publishing an up-to-date hash value in an ad section of The New York Times every week since 1995.
Surety is also the very first commercial deployment of blockchain. Every week the time-stamping service took all the hash values and boiled them down into a hexadecimal, base 16 number. The resulting sequence has been published in the classified ad in the national edition of Sunday New York Times.
In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto went on to revolutionize this existing blockchain technology by adding the concept of mining, which created financial incentives for participation in retaining and verifying parts of the distributed ledger. The purpose this time is much more ambitious, that is to transfer value without the aid or participation of any third party.
In Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper three (3) out of eight (8) articles cited were written by Stuart Haber and John Stornetta. There are some who even believe that they are Satoshi Nakamoto, or at the very least involved in the invention of Bitcoin.
However, both scientists have repeatedly denied in various interviews any affiliation with the development of Bitcoin. It could also be inferred from their interviews that they are not fan of Bitcoin themselves.
References:
1. The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New York Times Since 1995, https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5nzx4/what-was-the-first-blockchain
2. The Longest Running Blockchain has Existed on NYT Pages Since 1995, https://toshitimes.com/the-longest-running-blockchain-has-existed-on-nyt-pages-since-1995/
