As curious as you’d be to find out who crafted this genius idea, it is a group or an individual that chooses to go by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. In 2008, they conceptualized the first blockchain; they are the ones who developed bitcoin, authored the bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed the original reference implementation for it. They also structured the first database for blockchain. A blockchain is an expanding list of records (or blocks) linked via cryptography. Each block holds a cryptographic hash of the previous, a timestamp, and transaction data. Blockchains are resistant to modification of data and acts as the public transaction ledger of the cryptocurrency bitcoin.

To refer to the marketing of blockchains, we often come across the term ‘snake oil’.