In 1991 W. Scott Stornetta and Stuart Haber published a document titled “How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document”. They were the first to think of linking blocks of data cryptographically, with a combination of timestamps and digital signatures, thus a blockchain. Or in more technical terms:
Our first solution begins by observing that the sequence of clients requesting time-stamps and the hashes they submit cannot be known in advance. So if we include bits from the previous sequence of client requests in the signed certificate, then we know that the time-stamp occurred after these requests. But the requirement of including bits from previous documents in the certificate also can be used to solve the problem of constraining the time in the other direction, because the time-stamping company cannot issue later certificates unless it has the current request in hand.
In other words, they invented the blockchain we know now. 17 years later, Satoshi Nakamoto released it’s Bitcoin whitepaper, which added digital currency to the blockchain-principle.
Blockchain Whitepaper Abstract
The prospect of a world in which all text, audio, picture, and video documents are in digital form on easily modifi able media raises the issue of how to certify when a document was created or last changed. The problem is to time-stamp the data, not the medium. We propose computationally practical procedures for digital time-stamping of such documents so that it is infeasible for a user either to back-date or to forward-date his document, even with the collusion of a time-stamping service. Our procedures maintain complete privacy of the documents themselves, and require no record-keeping by the time-stamping service.
Read the whitepaper here!
Blockchain Whitepaper