[bawolff]

> Concept #3 : Bitcoin utilized super-smart magic from several apparently-unrelated fields of CS to make the fantastical spreadsheet from concept

Not really. Bitcoin (i.e. the original satoshi version) is hashcash, data structure merging and some game theory. Its an ingenious system, no doubt, but its ingenious because it put together some really well known building blocks in a smart way. It definitely did not use super advanced stuff from any field of CS, let alone multiple.

And that's not a dig at it either. In many ways that makes it more impressive.

[Banana699]

Bitcoin effectively invented, completely from scratch with no precedents I'm aware of, a probabilistic Atomic Total-Order Broadcast algorithm, that's a pretty damn advanced Distributed Systems problem to me, and a solution that was never investigated in Distributed Systems orthodox literature before it as far as I know. So, in no way "really well known".

And public-private crypto & hash pointer data structures are both fairly advanced CS from multiple fields. Public Key Crypto was discovered in the late 1970s and only further explored in the 1980s, hash data structures only in the 1980s and 1990s. That's fairly young, most vanilla CS ideas date from the 1960s or before. Just because the public APIs of those things can be explained in an afternoon doesn't mean at all that they aren't advanced concepts: I can explain what a hydrogen bomb does to a 10 year old, but that wouldn't imply the Hbomb isn't advanced nuclear physics.

[bawolff]

> Bitcoin effectively invented, completely from scratch with no precedents I'm aware of, a probabilistic Atomic Total-Order Broadcast algorithm,

Yes, the new thing bitcoin invented was novel and quite interesting. I'm not sure that is the words i would use to name it, but the result still stands.

> Just because the public APIs of those things can be explained in an afternoon doesn't mean at all that they aren't advanced concepts

Of course not. They are advanced concepts because they are some of the most basic concepts in the field and used throughout the industry. Hash functions are so prevalent that we literally have special x86 instructions just to speed up calculating sha256.

Compare for example to things like ZK-SNARKs, or homomorphic encryption which are actually cutting edge cryptography.