History of Cryptocurrency Development 1️⃣

1. 1982: David Chaum, the father of digital currency, proposed the "blind signature" algorithm in his paper "Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments", which is an important origin of digital currency thinking;

2. 1989: David Chaum founded DigiCash and began to experiment with the first digital currency in human history, eCash, but the company filed for bankruptcy in 1999 due to poor management, and eCash also failed;

3. 1993: The Bank of Finland launched the Avant smart card system, which was the world's first attempt at central bank digital currency, but the system was eventually eliminated in the early 21st century;

4. 1994: Nick Szabo, the father of "smart contracts", first proposed the concept of "smart contracts", and Hal Finney proposed that mail forwarders can be monetized through anonymous "tokens" and "cash tokens";

5. 1996: Douglas Jackson invented the e-gold payment system, which digitized the transaction model of the gold standard era by anchoring the price of gold at 1:1 and providing 100% gold reserves. However, the system went bankrupt under government pressure in 2009 because it became a hotbed of crime;

6. 1998: Wei Dai proposed the first decentralized currency concept B-money, and first proposed to apply distributed storage technology to digital currency. B-money is regarded as the first truly digital cryptocurrency, with decentralized settlement architecture, anonymous transactions, peer-to-peer network and other features, but due to the lack of repeated payments and currency generation problems, it did not become a reality;

7. 2008: Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", describing an electronic currency he called "Bitcoin" and its algorithm. In 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto released the first Bitcoin software and officially launched the Bitcoin financial system. The first block to be built is called the Genesis Block, which has a unique ID number. Except for the genesis block, each subsequent block contains two ID numbers, one is the ID number of the block itself, and the other is the ID number of the previous block. Through the forward and backward pointing relationship between the ID numbers, all blocks are connected in sequence to form a blockchain;

8. 2010: Satoshi Nakamoto gradually faded out and handed over the project to other members of the Bitcoin community. Satoshi Nakamoto is believed to hold about one million Bitcoins.These bitcoins will be worth more than $40 billion by the end of 2021;