The mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto is often credited with inventing blockchain – the tech behind the recent cryptocurrency and decentralization boom. But long before Nakamoto published his seminal paper that shaped Bitcoin as we know it, Ripple chief technology officer David Schwartz had already come up a similar concept. Almost 30 years ago on August 25, 1988, Schwartz filed a patent for a “multilevel distributed computer system” that would “preferably” run on “personal computers.” The technology was designed to leverage the combined processing power of numerous devices to accomplish singular tasks. Three years later, Schwartz was eventually granted the patent. While the…

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