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by thisisit 2973 days ago
> What is a "blockchain"?

I am always curious, blockchain was not defined in Nakamoto's work. So, where did the word actually originate from? And what did it meant for the word's inventor.

2 comments

> blockchain was not defined in Nakamoto's work

However the whitepaper does use the phrase "chain of blocks". https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf, page 7.

So probably the word "blockchain" came about because someone read or heard someone else say "chain of blocks" in the paper and they said "oh, so a blockchain", and thus the word was born.

Wikipedia cites what looks like a mirror of Nakamoto's original Bitcoin source, which uses "block chain" in the comments of main.h: https://github.com/trottier/original-bitcoin/blob/master/src...