Blockchain: The buzzword with a mysterious origin

With the start of the 2020s, we witnessed the price and?popularity of Bitcoin, along with other cryptocurrencies, skyrocketing. By April 2021, the value of one Bitcoin soared to its heights, reaching?up to $63,000. Restrictions imposed by the countries due to the global COVID pandemic led to the surge of crypto trading. But what exactly are cryptocurrencies, and how did they become a global phenomenon?

Photo by?Hitesh Choudhary?on?Unsplash

How it all started?

It all started on 18 August 2008,?when a person or a group of people published a white paper called?“Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, under the pseudonym, “Satoshi Nakamoto”. This paper revolutionized the world and introduced Bitcoin as the first Blockchain, as a concept to the world. Nakamoto went ahead a bit further to develop and release the first version of the Bitcoin software and laid the foundation of the Bitcoin network by defining its?genesis block or block 0. For people who do not know what block 0 is, it is the starting block of any blockchain which serves its foundation.

Source:?https://tecracoin.medium.com/what-is-genesis-block-and-why-genesis-block-is-needed-1b37d4b75e43

But here comes an interesting fact. There was no mention of Blockchain as the term in the original paper of Bitcoin by Nakamoto!! It is still a mystery from where did this term originate and how it came to use. In the document, we could find the words “block” and “chain” used separately many times but never together as used today. The paper discusses the concept of a block as a cluster of different items like transactions. These blocks are then linked with each other via cryptographic methods to form the chains of blocks.

An excerpt from the original white paper of Bitcoin,?Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, highlighting the term “chain of blocks”.

Even this paper did not invent the term, so where did the term “Blockchain” emerge? Let us find out.

Mystery of “Blockchain”

It is one of the mysteries which has been present in the blockchain community. To solve this mystery, let us try to gather some leads when this term got into acceptance.

The first and obvious place one could expect to find is its time of origin would be the research papers. The research papers are the best source for any novel technology or techniques found by scientists and researchers. So, it makes sense to find the term “Blockchain” among the few of the first papers about it. By reverse searching on Google Scholar, you would find one of the earliest papers which mention “Blockchain” is?“Purely P2P Crypto-Currency With Finite Mini-Blockchain”?by J.D. Bruce. This paper was published in May 2013 and suggested a security measure in the Blockchain by reducing its size.

One of the first documents about Blockchain, "Purely P2P Crypto-Currency with Finite Mini-Blockchain" by J.D. Bruce

However, there exists another searching method that allows finding the history of a word. Google Trends !! Google Trends is a tool developed by Google, which shows the search trends during a time.?Google Trends result for Blockchain?shows that the term started getting popular around April 2013, with just three searches on Google Web Search.

Google Trends dataset for Blockchain.

So, it seems that as of around 2013, “Blockchain” started becoming popular among the community and developers. But is it so? Check out my article on Medium.com??