Before Bitcoin: The ideas that made blockchains possible

People often tell the story of the first Bitcoin whitepaper as if it materialized in a vacuum and then led linearly to mining, smart contracts, tokens, DeFi, and every successive generation of blockchain design. But the intellectual history of these technologies is actually much older and more labyrinthine, complete with twists, turns, and false starts. And instead of a single inventor (or two), the foundational technologies behind blockchains pull on threads left by others.

For instance, answering questions like: How can machines agree when some fail or behave maliciously? How can strangers communicate and coordinate trustlessly? How do the rules of a market affect how people behave within them? Blockchains didn’t create these questions. But they have brought them together, helping propel them forward in new contexts.

This is why we created First Principles, a special series of conversations hosted by Institute for Advanced Study professor and a16z crypto Head of Research Tim Roughgarden. Throughout, Turing Award winners, Nobel laureates, and Gödel Prize winners share the origin stories behind their pioneering work — much of which underpins things we use every day — and explore how work done for one problem later became part of technologies its creators never anticipated.

You can watch all of the conversations here.

Barbara Liskov (2008 Turing Award Winner, MIT) shares her path from programming languages and data abstraction to distributed systems, the development of viewstamped replication and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance, and the importance of specification and careful reasoning when building systems that have to survive failure.

“It felt to me like we were in a fun house full of these distorting mirrors. You had to really think about things in an odd way to come to grips with this.” — Barbara Liskov

Leslie Lamport (2013 Turing Award Winner, most recently at Microsoft Research) discusses his work on concurrency, logical clocks, Byzantine agreement, state machine replication, and Paxos, and how problems that began as theoretical questions became central to distributed computing.

“I got back a letter from the editor pointing out where the bug in my algorithm was. This had two effects. The first was, it made me realize how tricky concurrency is, and how you really have to be essentially able to prove the correctness of a concurrent algorithm. And the second was, I’m just gonna solve that damn problem.” — Leslie Lamport

Alvin Roth (2012 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Stanford University) explains how market design moved from economic theory into institutions — including medical matching, school choice, and kidney exchange — and why the rules of a market often determine whether the market can exist at all.

“That was really the beginning of my career as a practical market designer, when I agreed that their hard problems would become my problem.” — Alvin Roth

Paul Milgrom (2020 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Stanford University) discusses auction theory and the movement between theoretical economics and practical mechanism design — including the growing dialogue between economists and computer scientists.

“Many of the assumptions that we make in economics are arbitrary for convenience, for simplicity. And they’re just wrong.” — Paul Milgrom

Ron Rivest (2002 Turing Award Winner, MIT) revisits the invention of RSA and the early development of public-key cryptography, digital signatures, and hash functions, as well as the evolution of the security assumptions that underpin much of modern digital communication.

“Most of mathematics turns out to be useful somewhere, and cryptography is a great consumer of mathematics.” — Ron Rivest

Shafi Goldwasser (2012 Turing Award Winner, MIT), co-inventor of zero-knowledge proofs, traces the path from early cryptographic puzzles to interactive proofs and zero knowledge, and from there to questions about efficient verification that eventually helped make modern SNARKs possible.

“For me, I need a narrative. There has to be, first of all, a story in your head. The problem is more of a narrative, and now you can attach to it a specific math problem.” — Shafi Goldwasser

Noam Nisan (2012 Gödel Prize Co-Winner, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, also StarkWare) reflects on complexity theory, the sum-check protocol, algorithmic game theory, and the unpredictable path by which theoretical ideas can become part of practical systems decades after they first appear.

“I never thought of this as anything that could be practical … It was highly theoretical, and I was sure it [would] never become useful.” — Noam Nisan