Dackshata Srihari, School of Law, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Kattankulathur
CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION
The blockchain technology was introduced to the world through a white paper by developer(s) under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in the year 2008, and since then it has taken over the technological world with its enhanced features. As a distributed ledger system, one of the unique activities of a blockchain includes enabling safe, secure and transparent documentation and most importantly it ensures that the ledger cannot be tampered with. The Fortune Business Insight (market intelligence company) had estimated the market size for the blockchain technology globally as around USD 17.57 billion in 2023 and is also estimated to grow to USD 87.84 billion in 2024. Whereas Statista valued the market value to be 5.85 billion dollars in 2021. From these estimated statistics, we can see that there has been a progressive development of blockchain technology over the years. With developments arise new innovations. And now with the blockchain technology’s different types of Use Cases, the growth of the technology is guaranteed across various sectors and industries.
1.0 History of Blockchain:
In the year 1991, with an aim to improve the system of untampered documented timestamps, a blockchain project was initiated by two researchers, Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta. It might be surprising to know that the concept of blockchain came 20 years before the invention of bitcoin. Their research paper titled “ How to time-stamp a digital document”, detailed the Time Stamping Service (TSS) on digital records which verifies the originality of the document using digital signatures or hash functions. These documents are then chained together where a time sequence is created. Subsequently, in 1998, a theoretical decentralized digital currency was designed by Nick Szabo, known as “BitGold”, which paved the way to a decentralized future since it is termed as a “a direct precursor to the Bitcoin architecture”. He also proposed a chain sequence with documents that are time stamped by using “hashcash”, which is the predecessor of the Proof of Work (PoW) system. Two years later, Stefan Konst, a computer scientist, through his research paper titled “Secure Log Files Based on
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