From a technical point of view, blockchain is known as the underlying technology of Bitcoin, and Bitcoin is the first application of blockchain.
Bitcoin and blockchain are equivalent to the relationship between the table and wood. People first discovered a beautiful table, and later discovered that the material of the table is a good wood, and it can also be used to make chairs, cabinets and boxes.
The blockchain technology appeared earlier, but it was defined as a block after Bitcoin. There are a lot of information on this.
In 1991, the seminal paper on blockchain technology was published in the Journal of Cryptology-"How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document". The two authors are: Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta.The digital signature based on public key encryption technology was proposed in the 1970s, and it was very perfect in the 1990s.
Hash tree (also known as Merkle tree) is a computer data structure proposed and patented by American computer expert Ralph Merkle in 1979.
Using this feature of the hash tree, Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta transformed the original direct link method of a single document into a link method in which a set of documents forms a hash tree. Here, the hash The tree is the so-called "block".
