The Fundamentals of Bitcoin
As we all know, Bitcoin, as the first application of blockchain technology, showed us what this technology can do. Although there are thousands of articles written about how this technology, which strains our brains and is quite difficult to understand and explain, works, the resources that tell the history of Bitcoin and blockchain technology (before 2008) are still very limited. However, the easiest way to understand a technology is to read its history, personally internalize it, and rediscover it! In this article, we will not examine how blockchain works, but rather the history of this invention and what projects inspired it.
As we all know, Bitcoin, as the first application of blockchain technology, showed us what this technology can do. Although there are thousands of articles written about how this technology, which strains our brains when we think about it, and is quite difficult to understand and explain, works, the resources that tell the history of Bitcoin and blockchain technology (before 2008) are still very limited. However, the easiest way to understand a technology is to read its history, personally internalize it, and rediscover it! In this article, we will not examine how blockchain works, but rather the history of this invention and what projects inspired it. According to many sources, Bitcoin was established by a cypherpunk (Satoshi Nakamoto) after the 2008 economic crisis to challenge the current economic system. While this is true to some extent, it is certainly not enough information in terms of the history of the subject! Many inventions, discoveries, and innovations in human history have been carried out by genius talents. For example, Edison invented the light bulb, A. Graham Bell invented the telephone. However, today, thanks to the internet and ease of communication, our way of inventing and discovering innovations is changing. In the future, many inventions and innovations will be realized either through public web platforms such as GitHub and forums where multiple individuals can work collaboratively, or through private platforms such as corporate companies and Startups. Bitcoin was also discovered and developed through communication on a forum platform. Although there is evidence that Satoshi Nakamoto, with his well-known pseudonym, was actually multiple people, it is not possible to reach a definitive answer. However, the only thing we know is that we owe Bitcoin's current usability to multiple people because Bitcoin is not a single technology but rather a harmonious combination of multiple technologies and theories. So, how was this technology, which every person contributing to this ecosystem, directly or indirectly, developed even further? As many of us think, Satoshi Nakamoto did not think overnight and say "EUREKA." Just as today's blockchain projects owe this technology to Bitcoin, Bitcoin also owes its idea and infrastructure to many pioneering projects that were developed in the past and failed. Bitcoin, born from the remnants of these projects, has opened a new era in many areas today. Some important precursors of the blockchain application: Digicash: Developed by David Chaum, one of the pioneers of the Cypherpunk movement. Its purpose was to allow a bank to create digitally signed lumps of digital cash for its customers. David Chaum and the Digicash company published this concept in 1983 and named this system eCash and the currency "CyberBucks." Some banks tried to use this technology, but Digicash was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1998 due to insufficient consensus. B-Money: Wei Dai, one of the pioneers of cryptography, published an article in 1998 describing the B-Money protocol. The goal was not only to establish an untraceable communication network that provided pseudonyms to senders and receivers, but also to broadcast the transaction encrypted with the sender's digital signature to the entire network. Does that sound familiar? Hashcash: In 1992, when unsolicited and spam emails were one of the most important problems of the internet, C. Dwork and M. Naor found a way to combat these problems. In this method, eac…