[gwern]

> This realization raises interesting questions about the political motivations of Satoshi Nakamoto in presenting their creation as a digital currency when they must have known that they had solved this far more important general problem.

He was well aware: he posted a short essay to bitcoin.org explaining how Bitcoin is a general solution to the Byzantine Generals problem, and if you read his early cryptography/p2presearch ML threads, he specifically says that digital money is but the earliest and most obvious application, and that far more could be built on top of it, and he hoped there would be, and included the dangerously-complex scripting language specifically to support more complex functionality than simply a global ledger.

It's not his fault if everyone else was more interested in applying Bitcoin to financial transactions than exploring approaches like Namecoin.