While we are looking towards the present and the future in this book, it is still crucial for you to understand the past. It is this past that paved the way to the entire cryptospace as we know it today. There had been some ‘experiments’ in the past, such as B-money, which was a kind of ‘cryptocurrency’ that was released in 1998 by Wei Dai (Bitcoin was even named after B-money so its importance cannot be underestimated). Even before the emergence of B-money there was the creation of ecash by David Chaum as early as 1983. People often have the idea that the search for a real ‘digital’ currency is something new but since the advent of the internet, people have been searching for possibilities to implement digital currencies in a secure manner and it is in this field that blockchain finds its initial roots. However, also technologies that were used in security (such as hashcash) and the idea of peer-to-peer networks (which we know from file sharing application such as Napster or Bittorrent) all were crucial parts that eventually led to blockchain technology.