The blockchain is set today to empower inclusion, democracy and organisations around the world in the next 20 years.
It all started with the Satoshi Nakamoto -nickname for a still anonymous person or group of persons- 2008 White Paper on the Bitcoin, who set the seed for the Bitcoin and for all the successive Blockchain-powered Cryptocurrencies and Applications (together with the previous works on cryptography by Haber and Stornetta and Nick Szabo for the Smart Contractcs) . The white paper describes how cryptography, distributed ledgers, irreversible transactions, time stamp and proof-of-works can create trust in a peer-to-peer network, thus making real basis for the following blockchain applications.
You can read the Satoshi nakamoto white paper abstract below, as well as the whole Satoshi Nakamoto White paper directly from the bitcoin.org website.
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Abstract (from Satoshi Nakamoto White Paper)
A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending. We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network. The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work. The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power. As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network, they’ll generate the longest chain and outpace attackers. The network itself requires minimal structure. Messages are broadcast on a best effort basis, and nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the longest proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone