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Snow [i-hash-you-hash-we-all-hash-for-bitcash] writes:

Motherboard has a story about a blockchain that predates Bitcoin by 13 years [vice.com]:

The first time I heard about blockchains was at a party where a friend of mine spent the night talking my ear off about this thing called Bitcoin and why I ought to buy some. I suspect that many others have had a similar experience. Although Bitcoin can be credited with bringing blockchains—a type of distributed digital ledger—into popular discourse, it wasn’t the progenitor of the obscure technology’s key features.

In fact, the world’s oldest blockchain predates Bitcoin by 13 years and it’s been hiding in plain sight, printed weekly in the classified section of one of the world’s most widely circulated newspapers: The New York Times.

This 'blockchain' is produced by a company called Surety [surety.com].

[...] Surety’s main product is called “AbsoluteProof [surety.com]”[.pdf] that acts as a cryptographically secure seal on digital documents. Its basic mechanism is the same described in Haber and Stornetta’s original paper. Clients use Surety’s AbsoluteProof software to create a hash of a digital document, which is then sent to Surety’s servers where it is timestamped to create a seal. This seal is a cryptographically secure unique identifier that is then returned to the software program to be stored for the customer.

At the same time, a copy of that seal and every other seal created by Surety’s customers is sent to the AbsoluteProof “universal registry database,” which is a “hash-chain” composed entirely of Surety customer seals. This creates an immutable record of all the Surety seals ever produced, so that it is impossible for the company or any malicious actor to modify a seal. But it leaves out an important part of the blockchain equation: Trustlessness. How can anyone trust that Surety’s internal records are legit?

Instead of posting customer hashes to a public digital ledger, Surety creates a unique hash value of all the new seals added to the database each week and publishes this hash value in the New York Times. The hash is placed in a small ad in the Times classified section under the heading “Notices & Lost and Found” and has appeared once a week since 1995.

Original Submission