On Halloween day 2008, a mysterious paper entitled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System appeared on a cryptography mailing list. Its author, Satoshi Nakamoto, was a pseudonym and, to this day, no one is absolutely sure of his or her true identity. Nevertheless, the revolution the paper unleashed was all too real.
While the objective of the Bitcoin paper was to establish an alternative currency—a concept that had great resonance in the midst of the global financial crisis—it soon became clear to many that the underlying technology, called blockchain, could be of even greater utility as a distributed database.
