Blockchain: Past, Present and Future

Blockchain, a groundbreaking technology, has captivated minds with its recent advancements and applications in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It's transforming the global market and challenging our understanding of various industries. The potential of merging blockchain with Artificial Intelligence opens new avenues in cybersecurity, web development, and beyond. As we explore the history, current state, and prospects of this emerging technology, it sparks curiosity and excitement about its evolving role in research and various industries.

The blockchain journey commenced in 1991 when scientists Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta sought a computational solution for time-stamping digital documents to prevent tampering or misdating. Collaboratively, they developed a system using cryptography, storing time-stamped documents in a chain of blocks. By 1992, blockchain emerged as an efficient data storage method. However, in 2004, the technology became dormant due to the existence of a patent.

“Reusable Proof of Work” by Hal Finney was introduced in 2004 which seemed to change the path of commencement for blockchain and gave it a new hope. This System helped in solving the Double Spending Problem by keeping the ownership of tokens registered on a trusted server. In 2008 Satoshi Nakatomo’s conceptualized concept of “Distributed blockchain” followed a peer-to-peer network of time stamping. It became so useful that Cryptography became the backbone of Blockchain.

The security of block chain was so secure that, there are 127 million dollars in bitcoin kept unclaimed in the system. This all started in 2009 when, James Howells an IT worker from United Kingdom started mining bitcoins which are a part of blockchain and stops in 2013. After spending 17K dollars on mining bitcoins, he decided to keep them in a hard drive, which eventually got thrown in the trash in 2013 by our genius IT worker.

·? 2014, marking the turning point for blockchain. The technology block chain gets separated from currency and blockchain 2.0 in is born.

·? In 2015 when the idea of writing smart contracts and dApps which could be deployed to a live network were launched inside Ethereum Frontier Network. Launching of which, gave birth to the concept of NFTs.

In hindsight 120,000 bitcoins were stolen when someone exploited a bug in the Ethereum DAO code. Everyone thought that the bitcoin game was over due to its vulnerability to exploitation of bugs and maybe it would lead to another market collapse. This effected its growth and market popularity in 2018 dropping its value to a drop of $3,800 at the end of the year.

·? In 2019, everything changed, Ethereum network transactions exceeded 1 million per day, amazon announced general availability of the Amazon managed Blockchain serviced AWS, which somehow brought back blockchain back to life.?

·? In 2022, Ethereum was shifted from Proof of Work(PoW) to Proof of Stake(PoS) consensus mechanism. The original Ethereum main net merged with Beacon Chain which has Proof-of-Stake. Now it is existing as one chain. Reducing Ethereum’s energy consumption by ~99.95%.

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Today, the cryptocurrency market has a lot of players in it, from dogecoin to bitcoin, all the crypto currencies have the same technology behind them. Block chain works on the concept of cryptography. In todays time the cryptocurrencies have taken over the transaction market, from trading to a great potential in its use for day to day transactions. The Crypto currency market is at a ground breaking rate of growth at 12.5%? from 2023 to 2030 to reach 11.71 billion by 2030.

Blockchain projects continue to advance in decentralized finance (DeFi), especially cryptocurrency, where the technology is having its big breakthrough and continues to shine. But blockchain advancements are growing in other sectors also.

The use of blockchain backed technology has peaked over the period of 5 years. It has peaked the interest of enterprise executives.

They have explored how blockchain is being used in the industry and how it can be used to create more effective, efficient and secure platforms for various business needs, including identity and access management, supply chain management, smart contracts, and document management and verification.

The future for Blockchain seem bright and looks like till the amount we have used it, is just the tip of the iceberg. With deep options in its exploration, like NFT’s, blockchain based websites, Crypto Market, smart contracts.

Blockchain and its derivatives, like NFTs, Cryptocurrencies, etc., have a huge market potential, but lack a proper market and monetization techniques with regulations and acceptance from the different country governments and its people. Blockchain can literally suffice the need of this hour in change of the market and bring out new creators and artist, including new business ideas and new development of different technologies. Despite all this, we know that this market is highly volatile and can be easily manipulated. This is one of the revolutionizing technologies, but we need a bit more patience and regulations in this, to consider it as the future of trading.

Written by Eileen Wong