How did Blockchain begin?

Blockchain began life as the system underpinning Bitcoin, the world's first decentralised currency. Bitcoin was thirty years in the making, starting with the work of cryptographers such as Ralph Merkle and David Chaum in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It evolved alongside credit cards and digital payment systems like PayPal. In the 1990s the Crypto Anarchist movement and the Cypher Punks started to look at how peer to peer payments and contracts might work, in other words payments or contracts that could be trusted without the involvement of a central authority (like a bank or even a government).

On 31st October 2008, "Satoshi Nakamoto" published a short paper entitled "Bitcoin: A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System." The first Bitcoin was created on 3rd January 2009.