Origin

A blockchain is a decentralized ledger of information built out of a network of independent computers referred to as "nodes".

A blockchain technology was conceived in the early 1990's. Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta published a paper describing an architecture for timestamping digital documents. The goal was to certify when media had been created or changed without modifying the media. The technique for doing this involved building a network of blocks secured by cryptographic algorithms.

In 2009, a paper entitled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System published under the name Satoshi Nakamoto described the implementation of the first blockchain used to create the first cryptocurrency.

The hallmark of a blockchain is that it doesn't depend on the trust of a single entity. The author, Satoshi Nakamoto, has not been identified. The inability to identify the creator of Bitcoin is consistent with blockchain's use of node consensus to validate transactions vs. reliance on a single known entity.