A few days ago, Bitcoin celebrated its 12th birthday.
How many things have changed since he set foot in the real world, bringing with him all the innovation of a technology until the unknown time.
Yet Bitcoin wasn't the only experiment of its kind.
It is with the appearance of the internet and all its subsequent developments that everything around us begins its process of transformation.
The Internet has made it possible to connect the entire global population by allowing people to potentially communicate with anyone and anywhere on the planet with one click.
In short, our world has suddenly become a smaller place.
But above all, the age of the Internet and Internet users increasingly unleashed on the web, has given rise to the need to find a new payment system suitable and in step with the new digital communication system.
In the new world of online shopping, the old and rigid payment systems were no longer enough.
Someone was beginning to wonder about the possibility of creating a digital currency equivalent to cash.
And DigiCash was the answer, founded by David Chaum in 1989, it was an electronic money created for the management of online payments, whose transactions remained anonymous on the web through cryptographic protocols.
Unfortunately Chaum was unable to bring his DigiCash into the banking world, the cumbersome banking system and the distrust of merchants to accept it as a payment method, certainly did not help its spread.
The coup de grace came at the hands of a group of cryptographers who wanted to prove how unsafe DigiCash was yet and made a "hacked" version of it called MagicMoney.
Clearly Chaum's company went bankrupt.
But it is from failures that something revolutionary can arise.
From the creators of MagicMoney a movement was born that rode the scene of the nineties, it is above all to their need for anonymity that we owe the birth of new protocols aimed at making it difficult to trace communications.
I'm talking about the Cypherpunk Movement which at the end of the eighties felt the need to defend the privacy of citizens from the nascent digital big brother.
The Cypherpunks were afraid of how governments could exploit the potential of the internet, perhaps using the network to spy on and monitor citizens, especially by reading their private emails.
In this context, Proof of Work was born, which would later become an algorithmic pillar of Bitcoin, but in 1997 Adam Back created it to limit email spam and DoS attacks.
Then in 1998 comes B-Money presented through a whitepaper, a precursor of modern white papers, which described in detail the operation of the first anonymous and distributed cryptocurrency created by its developer Wei Dai.
Did you remember it?
No, because even this digital currency never managed to get beyond its whitepaper.
And does HashCash and BitGold tell you something?
It was the very early 2000s and Hal Finney introduced the Reusable Proof of Work (RPoW), through which a private key was sent and stored on a central server and with a public key it was possible to carry out token transactions.
We come to Nick Szabo's BitGold, in 2005; by many BitGold is considered the true precursor of Bitcoin, the project that has come closest to the modern Blockchain.
In fact, a distributed register had the task of keeping the proof of the solution of the mathematical problem carried out by the computer, a string of bits that also had a value as a certificate of ownership, after however having been previously validated by all the nodes of the network.
And this last step is certainly very familiar, it is the basis of decentralized cryptocurrencies.
The birth of Bitcoin and the consequent development of increasingly modern technologies to support innovative projects and increasingly sophisticated crypto coins, are the result of years of research, discovery, attempts in a sector that is still immature and all to be created.
In short, what Bitcoin and the whole world of decentralized finance are today, cannot ignore the past and all the people who strongly believed in their projects considered too advanced for the time and who instead turned out to be a precious contribution for the sector. computer science and cryptography.
And all those projects, today, we can find them perfectly interconnected with each other, in the foundations of any system that has been developed through Blockchain technology.
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