600watt,
Those are important inventions which influenced the world very much yes, but they haven't really revolutionized anything. Just made existing things more efficient.
Bitcoin is neither of those things. It could be a stepping stone to something that might qualify into the important category but on it's own it falls short of that and even the level before it.
The ponzi scheme accusation highlights one of it's major shortcoming: There is no correlation between it's perceived value and the amount of economic activity.
Also it's more a product than an invention, I know you don't wanna hear it but you can't deny it if you are honest.
Emucus,
i disagree. plastic did not make wood carving more efficent. it opened an entire new world that was not imaginable before. and printing is more than more efficient handwriting. it changed the world. electricity, illuminating the dark nights for the first time changed the way people lived in cities. trains are more than very efficient public stage coaches, they shrank the distances for the masses. never been done before.
what exactly is the difference between an product and an invention ? distributed trust of the bitcoin protocol WILL change the economy: all of a sudden i can trade with anyone in the world with a click of a mouse. i don´t believe you don´t see some of this. entering the age of encryption, bitcoin is a start.
Yes, plastic is almost kind of revolutionary, it made it much cheaper to make certain object which used to be made of wood or metal. But it didn't really lead to drastic changes in a sense that enabling things that were not only too expensive but unthinkable.
Electricity is not really an invention, it's a concept out of physics. Electric generators provide it, well there used to be batteries before that but they didn't really lead to drastic changes.
Of course some things on your list were important, getting into that isn't really the point of the debate here so I think we can leave it at that.
The rest of your post is sadly double speak. Distributed Blockchain ledgers and hash based proof of work is the innovation if you will, but Bitcoin is the product. It already comes with the ledger, which isn't really nessecary, so I say it's a product, not a protocol, if you strip the ledger you have a protocol (altcoins are using it) the rest is software.
It's not even an invention, in computing some progress in computer science is an invention. FFT for example, or more fundamental kernel bootstrap. Then you have applications, Linux for example or you have standards, like POSIX.
So:
The Bitcoin white-paper describes a standard for a protocol, like a RFC. (This raises the question why wasn't it published as an rfc...?)
Bitcoin is two different things: A proof of concept implementation of the protocol described in the white-paper and the
product of the satoshi genesis block ledger (and perhaps this community)
