This article correctly shows that virtually none of the ideas underpinning Bitcoin are new. They can all be traced to the academic literature going back decades.
Cryptographic signatures and public-key cryptography, cryptographic hash functions, cryptographic proof-of-work, time-stamping, Merkle trees, chains of transactions blocks, Byzantine fault tolerance, smart contracts -- all of these ideas were old when Bitcoin was invented.
Satoshi Nakamoto's achievement lays in the complex, ingenious way in which he (or she, or they) combined these ideas into a new distributed algorithm.[1]
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[1] For those who don't know, Satoshi Nakamoto's paper, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" proposed the first known solution to the double-spending problem in a peer-to-peer network (i.e., without centralized control), with Byzantine fault tolerance (i.e., in a manner resistant to fraudulent nodes attempting to game the rules), via a clever application of cryptographic proof-of-work. The paper is available at https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Cryptographic signatures and public-key cryptography, cryptographic hash functions, cryptographic proof-of-work, time-stamping, Merkle trees, chains of transactions blocks, Byzantine fault tolerance, smart contracts -- all of these ideas were old when Bitcoin was invented.
Satoshi Nakamoto's achievement lays in the complex, ingenious way in which he (or she, or they) combined these ideas into a new distributed algorithm.[1]
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[1] For those who don't know, Satoshi Nakamoto's paper, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" proposed the first known solution to the double-spending problem in a peer-to-peer network (i.e., without centralized control), with Byzantine fault tolerance (i.e., in a manner resistant to fraudulent nodes attempting to game the rules), via a clever application of cryptographic proof-of-work. The paper is available at https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf