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?<p>People claim it to be:
* Trustless, Proof of Work
* Immutable append only ledger (Blockchain)
* Smart Contracts<p>Are any of them new concepts?<p>While solving their problems, has the Crypto community invented any new general purpose Algorithms (or Data Structures) that could be used elsewhere?<p>I'm curious to understand those Algorithms.
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.)<p>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.
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.
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.<p>Nothing special about its structure or operation inherently.