HACKER Q&A
📣 emadehsan

What real innovation in CS can be attributed to Bitcoin?


Not an expert in the field, my question is: Can some real ground breaking innovation in Computer Science be attributed to Bitcoin and its successors?

People claim it to be: * Trustless, Proof of Work * Immutable append only ledger (Blockchain) * Smart Contracts

Are any of them new concepts?

While solving their problems, has the Crypto community invented any new general purpose Algorithms (or Data Structures) that could be used elsewhere?

I'm curious to understand those Algorithms.

  👤 PaulHoule Accepted Answer ✓
If you were working in the distributed systems field and trying to publish a paper at a conference you'd certainly get your paper rejected if adding a new node didn't increase the system's workload capacity. (e.g. the whole point of adding more nodes is to get performance.)

Bitcoin, being a network that doesn't scale in terms of workload, was something the CS community "overlooked" until Bitcoin showed it could have a purpose.

👤 karmakurtisaani
As much as I dislike cryptocurrencies, I do think the whole concept of distributed ledger is/was interesting from a theoretical point of view. There are still several unsolved problems in the field, so I could see some researchers working on them. I wouldn't, cause I don't like the application, but I can see the theoretical appeal.
👤 gregjor
No, it’s all derivative. The main innovations center around fraud and crime and exploring human gullibility, not computer science.
👤 bobkazamakis
Most of the innovative parts of bitcoin have been done independently as pieces; it's novelty is the combination of things like Proof of Work (Hashcash, Bitgold) with p2p consensus and asymmetric cryptography.

Nothing special about its structure or operation inherently.

👤 togaen
Nope. None of those are new concepts.