Bitcoin is the culmination of about thirty years of research during which the best minds worked together to perfect cryptographic techniques. The personal computer, the Internet, and modern cryptography are the three major innovations that made it possible for Bitcoin to emerge. It is a consequence of the digital revolution of 1989, which saw the birth of Web1, Web2, and Web3. Bitcoin came with a new technology that we came to know in 2008, but many are unaware of everything that happened before that year when the BITCOIN network was officially launched. Let me take you to the heart of the story.
1974: A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall06/cos561/papers/cerf74.pdf
1976: New Directions in Cryptography
https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/publications/24.pdf
1978: RSA Encryption
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem)
1980: Protocols for Public Key Cryptosystems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography
1983: Blind Signatures For Untraceable Payments
https://sceweb.sce.uhcl.edu/yang/teaching/csci5234WebSecurityFall2011/Chaum-blind-signatures.PDF
1985: Cryptography on Elliptic Curves
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic-curve_cryptography
1988: The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto
https://bitcoin.fr/the-crypto-anarchist-manifesto/
1989: Digicash
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash
1991: PGP - Pretty Good Privacy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy
1992: Cypherpunk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk
1993: A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hughes_(cypherpunk)
1994: CyberCash | The Cyphernomicon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberCash
1996: How to Make a Mint | E-gold
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm
1997: Hashcash
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2482110_Hashcash_-_A_Denial_of_Service_Counter-Measure
1997: Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/548
1998: Bit Gold | Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/secure-property-titles/
1998: B-money
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bmoney.asp
1999: Computer-Implemented Securities Trading System
https://patents.google.com/patent/US5950176A/en
2001: Distributed Hash Table | Bittorrent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent
2004: RPOW - Reusable Proofs of Work
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/finney/rpow/
2006: Liberty Reserve
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Reserve
2008: Birth of Bitcoin
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
And it succeeded where many others had failed.
