The concept of cryptocurrencies is built from forgotten ideas in research literature.
Arvind Narayanan and Jeremy Clark
“…not to diminish Nakamoto’s achievement but to point out that he stood on the shoulders of giants. Indeed, by tracing the origins of the ideas in bitcoin, we can zero in on Nakamoto’s true leap of insight—the specific, complex way in which the underlying components are put together. This helps explain why bitcoin took so long to be invented. Readers already familiar with how bitcoin works may gain a deeper understanding from this historical presentation.(…) Bitcoin’s intellectual history also serves as a case study demonstrating the relationships among academia, outside researchers, and practitioners, and offers lessons on how these groups can benefit from one another.
(…) Understanding all these predecessors that contain pieces of bitcoin’s design leads to an appreciation of the true genius of Nakamoto’s innovation. In bitcoin, for the first time, puzzle solutions don’t constitute cash by themselves. Instead, they are merely used to secure the ledger. Solving proof of work is performed by specialized entities called miners (although Nakamoto underestimated just how specialized mining would become)….”