Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree
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.<p>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.<p>Satoshi Nakamoto&#x27;s achievement lays in the complex, ingenious way in which he (or she, or they) combined these ideas into a new distributed algorithm.[1]<p>--<p>[1] For those who don&#x27;t know, Satoshi Nakamoto&#x27;s paper, &quot;Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System&quot; 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 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitcoin.org&#x2F;bitcoin.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitcoin.org&#x2F;bitcoin.pdf</a>