The New York Times has published the worlds oldest blockchain once a week for 28 years. Ironically, this blockchain was one of the inspirations for Bitcoin, which NYT has repeatedly bashed.

There's been a lot of news floating around about the New York Times article that spoke out against Bitcoin, so I thought I'd share a bit of fun (and slightly ironic) history.

The first ever blockchain has been operating since 1995, and is used to "stamp and seal" digital documents, in order to prove their authenticity and record their time of publication. It's similar to the way NFTs work today. The blockchain was created by Stuart Haber and W Scott Stornetta and is maintained by their company, Surety.

Surety's blockchain works a little bit differently that the ones that our beloved cryptocurrencies run on. Instead of broadcasting new blocks out to nodes that secure the network, Surety maintains a public database, and publishes a hash of the new database entries every week in the classifieds of a newspaper. Which newspaper, you ask? Well none other than the New York Times!

I just thought it was a funny coincidence, maybe a touch ironic, since Haber and Stornetta's work was one of the inspirations for what eventually became Bitcoin. In fact, Satoshi referenced three of Haber and Stornetta's publications in the original Bitcoin Whitepaper. NYT is criticizing a technology that was based on an innovation that they enabled.