**English and French subtitles available**
Olivier Bossard Executive Director of MSc in Finance at HEC Paris offers a historical perspective on the Blockchain revolution.
The Bitcoin Genesis! – Episode #2 of our History of the Blockchain
A video produced by InvestOrama:
FULL SCRIPT IN ENGLISH
On a personal level, I confess that I only got interested in the Blockchain at a late stage, in 2013 – 2014, while the first Bitcoin transaction happened four years earlier, in 2009. I was first curious, intrigued, then very skeptical I confess, and finally …”whao!” I was subjugated by the complexity of its mathematical model and its potential applications.
I dug into my applied maths and cryptography courses to try to understand this technology that is both extremely simple in principle and fascinatingly complex in its implementation and applications.
We must be humble: the blockchain is a very difficult technology to understand in depth.
Trying to trace the first works on the blockchain, that is cryptographically secured chains of blocks, we can go back to the “hash trees”, which were invented by Ralph Merkle in 1979. Then, the first concepts of virtual money were born in 1999, with the b-money of Wei Dai, then in 2005 with the Bit Gold of Nick Szabo. And yet, the genesis of Bitcoin goes back to October 2008: on an obscure forum of cypherpunks, mathematicians and geeks passionate about cryptography, an anonymous author having for pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published there a 9-page article, the famous “Bitcoin White Paper”.
This mythical article accurately described the protocol of operation of Bitcoin, and it already sketched with a formidable realism what the implications would be. Bitcoin was born!
Three months later, the community of cypherpunks had already implemented the code of Satoshi and, on January 3rd, 2009, the first transaction in Bitcoin (the famous “Bloc Genesis”) was executed.
– Olivier BOSSARD
Email: bossard@hec.fr
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