Ian Jansen van Rensburg, VMware SSA

In 2008, the famous whitepaper ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’ was posted to the Metzdowd cryptography mailing list under the name Satoshi Nakamato. It’s been cited almost 28 000 times, which is due to the elegance of its reasoning, the simplicity of its language and the foundational part it’s played in establishing the world’s most successful blockchain. (See sidebar)

The whitepaper showed that for the first time in human history, there was now a mechanism that would allow strangers to agree on data without any intervention by a third party. And, while any party can add data, no one can change it.