Who invented blockchain?

Of course, now a friendly chorus of voices will be heard: “Satoshi Nakamoto!” But if you think about it and look around a little, the answer will not be so obvious, and the old saying “The new is the well-forgotten old” will sparkle with new colors.

If we leave aside the main application of blockchain today, namely cryptocurrency, then the bottom line is that we get a decentralized data storage technology. And what is important is that all data is stored, that is, for the entire life of the system. And what is equally important - are stored very reliably, with minimal possibilities of distortion.  

And let me remind you again: “decentralized storage” is not equivalent to “distributed storage.”

Let me give you a simple example: Suppose a certain group of people decided to store the Bible in a decentralized manner. To do this, they would all rewrite the Bible, and each would keep his own copy. But if they decided to do the same thing in a distributed manner, they would divide it into parts in accordance with the number of participants in the experiment. 

As a result, distributed storage takes up less space, but decentralized storage guarantees against distortion of information under adverse conditions. If a hundred people keep a copy of a book, you can always, firstly, rewrite the lost page from any copy holder, and secondly, check the accuracy of the information from other copies.  

Now let’s leave the world of digital technology for a while, and let’s remember some of the processes occurring in living nature.

In any high school biology textbook you can find a description of human embryogenesis and ontogenesis. And observe how, in the process of development, the human embryo, on the way to its birth, goes through completely recognizable phases corresponding to other biological species, traditionally belonging to much earlier stages of evolution. In the process of formation, a person, for example, has gills, which we do not really need on land.

The “code” itself, which records the genome, is common, decentralized, for all organisms on earth. That is, in the worm Caenoharbditis elegans, and in the Drosophila fly, and in the mouse, and even in E. coli, information is “encoded” in the same way. But that’s not even what’s truly interesting and surprising. In humans, about 50% of the genome is the same as in the worm. That is, the human genome contains information on how to “assemble a worm.”

We have even more in common with ordinary mice, with which, according to scientists, humans diverged more than 100 million years ago.. To date, only about 300 genes have been discovered in the human genome that are not found in mice, and their total number is approximately the same. As a result, about 80% of the human genome and the mouse genome are identical, although there are minor differences. Well, for example, the mouse has more genes responsible for the sense of smell.

There are even fewer differences with our closer evolutionary relatives. For example, in humans and chimpanzees, 95% of the genome is completely identical, and only 5% is more or less different. Think about it, if only 5% of your genes were different, perhaps now you would be eating a banana while sitting on the branch of some nice African tree.

Now let's try to draw a parallel. The genome is a decentralized way of encoding information about how to build a living organism corresponding to a certain biological species. Moreover, genetic information is not strictly individual for each species, but is actively used by all the diversity of life on earth. This ensures not only the transmission, but also the safety of information.

And safety precisely by creating multiple copies. 

Specification - or evolution - most of all resembles the concept of blockchain forks, when a change in individual parameters of a cryptocurrency causes the appearance of an heir, but still retains information from the original chain.

And it turns out that human DNA itself, its set of chromosomes, the gene system as such is the oldest, and to date, the first example of a successful implementation of the blockchain concept, moreover, created by nature, or by the Creator - choose necessary, depending on your religious views. 

Although many things are implemented much more elegantly. For example, an error protection system built into the genome. However, the general concept undoubtedly corresponds to the classical ideology of blockchain. 

Although in the case of the genome, mining becomes a much more resource-intensive process, and usually takes at least 16-18 years (for a person)

And yes - everything is new, it’s well forgotten old...