“Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” – Steve Jobs
Back in 1994, I joined a company who was developing a document service for the trading companies in Hong Kong. The service facilitated the trading companies to send various trading documents to the Hong Kong Government securely and with authenticity.
The technology behind all these was Public Key Infrastructure, or asymmetric cryptography. Even though back then I was the System Architect of such system, the technology was totally new to me – Hashing, Asymmetric Encryption, Digital Signing etc. For some reasons however, I was intrigued by all these fancy technologies.
Fast forward to year 2000, Hong Kong rolled out the Smart IDs for Hong Kong citizens and each of these Smart IDs had a chip embedded that in theory you could store the Private Key inside it and did your own digital signing. And of course, with the receiving party’s Public Key, we could do secure encryption as well.
Eight years later, in October 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper on The Cryptography Mailing list at metzdowd.com, described the digital currency – BitCoin. And the infrastructure that BitCoin worked above was what we call now – Blockchain (this term is not used at all in the original white-paper).
By now, you all know Blockchain is again based on hashing, cryptography and time-stamping. Did I know what I learnt back in 1994 would become the foundation of the digital currency or even future computing infrastructure ?
No of course, because as Steve Jobs said … we can only connect the dots looking backwards.
I don’t know ten, twenty years later, what dots we all can connect and find something new. However, you may be able to get some insights on the following excellent documentary on Blockchain –
M.Y. Lessons Learnt 