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.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]--[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