General Idea of a Blockchain is Older

Intriguing snippet of information management history.

The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New York Times Since 1995
This really gives a new meaning to the “paper of record."

 .... In fact, the world’s oldest blockchain predates Bitcoin by 13 years and it’s been hiding in plain sight, printed weekly in the classified section of one of the world’s most widely circulated newspapers: The New York Times.

The world’s first blockchain

At its core, a blockchain is just a database that is maintained by a network of users and secured through cryptography. When new information is added to the database it is parceled in “blocks,” which can be thought of as containers for this data. Every so often a new block is created and linked to a “chain” of previously created blocks. Each block has a unique ID called a hash that is created by running the ID of the block that preceded it and the data stored in the current block through a cryptographic algorithm. This ensures the integrity of all the data stored on the blockchain because altering the data in any block would produce a different hash.

Today, “blockchain” is treated as shorthand for the technology that underlies most cryptocurrencies and digital token systems, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum. Although blockchains can be used as an immutable record of financial transactions, this is far from their only use. In fact, any type of information can be added to a blockchain and in the past everything from weed strains and virtual kittens to sushi and rare art has been stored on a distributed ledger.

Blockchains, insofar as they constitute a chronological chain of hashed data, were first invented by the cryptographers Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta in 1991 and their use cases were a lot less ambitious. Instead, Haber and Stornetta envisioned the technology as a way to timestamp digital documents to verify their authenticity. As they detailed in a paper published in The Journal of Cryptology, the ability to certify when a document was created or last modified is crucial for resolving things like intellectual property rights.

In meatspace, there a variety of mundane ways to timestamp a document, such as sending yourself the document in a sealed envelope or making chronological line entries in a notebook. In these cases, any evidence of tampering—like opening the envelope or trying to insert a page into the notebook—will be obvious. But when it comes to verifying the authenticity of a digital document, it’s much harder to determine if the document has been altered. .... "