Early references associated the words "block" and "chain" to cryptographical work done in 1991 by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta. Seventeen years later, in 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto, possibly/probably(?) a fictitious person - actually, a group of scientists(?) - joined the two words together and extended the concept for distributed processing of Bitcoin (COIN) (OTCQX:GBTC). Thenceforward, "blockchain" came to be known as a secure, book-of-record "ledger" for transacting business involving multiple parties. The foundational concepts and artifacts - functional decomposition, flowcharts, swim lane diagrams, workflow, etc. - have been around for quite some time, long before Bitcoin showed up on the scene. Wikipedia offers the following definition:

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