Adam Back introduced hashcash

Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta published an article about timestamping digital documents.

Cryptographer David Chaum first proposed a blockchain-like protocol in his 1982 dissertation "Computer Systems Established, Maintained, and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups.

Hal Finney introduced reusable PoW, a mechanism for receiving a non-exchangeable -- or non-fungible -- hashcash token in return for an RSA-signed token

Satoshi Nakamoto 👤 published a white paper introducing the concepts behind bitcoin and blockchain

Jan. 3, 2009. Nakamoto mined the first bitcoin block, validating the blockchain concept. The block contained 50 bitcoins and was known as the Genesis block -- aka block 0. 🎉

Jan. 8, 2009. Nakamoto released Bitcoin v0.1 to SourceForge as open source software. Bitcoin is now on GitHub.

Jan. 12, 2009. The first bitcoin transaction took place when Nakamoto sent Hal Finney 10 bitcoin in block 170.

An Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is a peer-to-peer file-sharing system created by Protocol Labs. IPFS is used for storing and accessing files, websites, applications, and data. IPFS uses content-addressing to identify each file in a global namespace connecting all computing devices.

Nick Szabo designed a mechanism for a decentralized digital currency he called "bit gold". Bit gold was never implemented, but has been called "a direct precursor to the Bitcoin architecture.

MINING is the process that Bitcoin and several other cryptocurrencies use to generate new coins and verify new transactions