In this highly readable article, the authors Arvind Narayanan and Jeremy Clark search for the academic origins of the concept behind Bitcoin and blockchain technology.

They start with a high-level overview of the basic characteristics of these technologies and link them to earlier research. Sure enough, they found that not just most, but actually all, of the Bitcoin principles had been developed by others prior to the invention of Bitcoin.

Scientists such as Haber and Stornetta wrote back in the early 1990s about the need to timestamp linked transactions required to set up a digital notary where it was essential to demonstrate the exact time of the creation of documents. Their data structure was used by Bitcoin, as was their use of the word “block” to group sets of documents [1].

Likewise, the idea of Bitcoin mining was based on the proof-of-work concept, originally developed by Dwork and Naor in 1992 [2]. They devised it at the time to prevent email spam by forcing the sender and receiver to solve a simple challenge. A party sending out mass spam emails would be encumbered by the calculations required to solve the challenges; therefore, spam would be reduced by increasing its “cost.”

The article systematically links back the key concepts of Bitcoin and the blockchain to earlier academic work. Putting it all together, the authors conclude with the inevitable suggestion that many more forgotten ideas might be present in older academic work.

The brilliance of Bitcoin’s inventor, Nakamoto, was not that he came up with new ideas, but rather that he was able to connect the dots between separate academic research, and was able to turn it into a product. In the final paragraph, the authors suggest that academic researchers should engage more with the real world.