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LogoutThe first work on a cryptographically secured chain of blocks was described by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta in 1991(academic paper). Their idea was to implement a tamper-proof document timestamps system. In the following year, they, together with Dave Bayer, improved its efficiency by allowing multiple document certificates to be collected in a block that was incorporated using Merkle trees.
The work focused on time-stamping documents, a popular use case for blockchain technology, even today. Many businesses use a public blockchain system to notarise documents. By storing hash values in a timestamped block on the blockchain, one can prove that a document existed at a certain time in a certain version. This has many applications, ranging from registering intellectual property rights to contract arbitration. The idea was to calculate the hash values of documents and save them with a timestamp. The records are linked up in a data structure by including hashes of previous records’ certificates.