Distributed systems are nothing new, yet somehow advances in this space tend to "disrupt" more thoroughly than anything else.
In the late 1960s, The Internet itself was developed as a decentralized system of computers capable of sustaining a nuclear attack. Individual computers were linked together via physical cables. A process known as packet switching was implemented to send data in disparate chunks, which were expected to be re-assembled in order on the receiving end.
By the late 1980s, academic works involving distributed consensus algorithms such as Paxos were introduced. TODO: flesh out
In 1991, the first World Wide Website went live, and what is now the most popular content and user interface layer for the internet was born. The web allowed anybody with the means to publish a website and link to other sites using their location-based addresses.
Already you can see we have a distributed infrastructure, the seeds of distributed computation, and a hyperlinked data structure. This alone TODO
TODO: Kleppman, etc
TODO: 1999-2004 Napster, Kazaa, etc.
Companies now use decentralized ways of organizing their data. By providing a centralized platform to manage a decentralized set of assets... TODO
The publication of the Bitcoin white paper in October 2008, started a new renaissance in our industry. Not only did it prove out a new technology in the blockchain, but it began a new way of thinking about distributed systems in general. In addition to giving rise to a new generation of financial applications with a high degree of speculative activity, Bitcoin's underlying (and beyond computationally expensive) proof-of-work algorithm gave us distributed consensus.
This gave the industry a new focus and a new way of thinking about a critical finance. The fact that it was published by a mysterious figure, the so-called Satoshi Nakamoto, only served to mystify technologists and TODO
TODO: IPFS
We would argue that cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies only laid the foundation of our distributed future. Projects like IPFS, which harness the power of directed acyclic graphs. TODO: Filecoin