Since its inception, blockchain technology (a shared ledger) has been called upon to transform industries, revolutionize payments, and reshape the web from the ground up. Beyond cryptocurrencies, its main applications are smart contracts, and the proposal to decentralize the Internet in the form of Web3 promises to create a new digital universe with more democratic exchanges of value thanks to tokenization.

As it may become one of the most transformative innovations of recent times, one of the most surprising things about blockchain technology is that we still don't know who invented it. It all started in 2008, when a person (or persons) under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published the document 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System'. Although his identity has been speculated on countless occasions since then, he has never been found. What has happened since then, in almost 15 years, is that this document has created a technology with many applications and a completely new industry, the crypto sector, which could be worth more than 150 billion euros in 2027.

To understand this success, it is necessary to examine what Nakamoto's paper said. If you look at its title, you'll see that it represents the birth of the term bitcoin, the world's first major cryptocurrency, from which all others and the multi-billion dollar investment business associated with them would be born. With this work, its author (or authors) wanted to create a digital currency that did not depend on any central entity, such as banks and governments. And, to achieve this, he needed an underlying technology, a computer system capable of supporting this idea.

Essentially, a way was needed to ensure that the same currency could not be used twice and that no one could tamper with it. And it had to be done automatically, that is, without a third party checking everything. To achieve this, his innovation was to record all transactions in an accounting book, whose information was available to all users and at the same time was incorruptible.

So instead of a single accounting record, he envisioned having an identical copy on all computers running the bitcoin software, checking and updating each time a new transaction occurred. Thus, if any user tried to tamper with the records, the information contained in the other ledgers would trigger alarms to prevent tampering.

That system was what we know today as blockchain. This makes their core verification process known as proof of work, making the bitcoin blockchain nearly impossible to tamper with, allowing users to trust the system. Or rather, it allows you to trust no one, which is precisely the key to the philosophy surrounding blockchain: zero trust. The information contained in the book, its open source code and the computer techniques that support the authenticity of transactions mean that users do not have to rely on a third party; technology verifies everything for them.

An important detail when entering the world of blockchain is that the terms blockchain and cryptocurrency are not synonymous, even though they may seem so at times. This error often occurs because digital cryptocurrencies and the blockchains that support them have the same name. The blockchain that powers the Bitcoin cryptocurrency is actually also called Bitcoin, but with a capital letter. While Bitcoin represents the digital equivalent of a currency, Bitcoin refers to the computer software that controls the currency.