> I'm rather mistrustful of people that are this forthy about being against a new technology.
If cryptocurrencies can even be called "technology".
I have enough skills to implement a crypto currency from scratch. Some building blocks there are impressive and very useful: public key signatures, hashes. _Maybe_ ciphers and polynomial hashes as well. Those things I cannot design though I did implemented from specs (it was a ton of work). But as we all know, those blocks existed long before cryptocurrencies, and have lots of other uses.
Then you have the chained hash, which is basically a degenerated form of Merkle trees (patented in 1979) that look like a Git commit history. Git was first published in 2005, Bitcoin first appeared in 2008. Then you have proof of work (some computation that is hard to do, but easy to verify), which was an established technique before Y2K.
In the end, the one idea Bitcoin introduced that may not be obvious is this idea of a "longest chain", based on proof of work. We have proof of stake as well, but for now I’m waiting for Ethereum to implement it at scale to believe in it (right now most transactions happen in proof of work).
If cryptocurrencies can even be called "technology".
I have enough skills to implement a crypto currency from scratch. Some building blocks there are impressive and very useful: public key signatures, hashes. _Maybe_ ciphers and polynomial hashes as well. Those things I cannot design though I did implemented from specs (it was a ton of work). But as we all know, those blocks existed long before cryptocurrencies, and have lots of other uses.
Then you have the chained hash, which is basically a degenerated form of Merkle trees (patented in 1979) that look like a Git commit history. Git was first published in 2005, Bitcoin first appeared in 2008. Then you have proof of work (some computation that is hard to do, but easy to verify), which was an established technique before Y2K.
In the end, the one idea Bitcoin introduced that may not be obvious is this idea of a "longest chain", based on proof of work. We have proof of stake as well, but for now I’m waiting for Ethereum to implement it at scale to believe in it (right now most transactions happen in proof of work).
It’s a stretch to call that "technology".