> one mankind’s most important inventions

to merely

> useful consequences

Sure, maybe there are useful consequences, especially if you need to defy governments or whatever. But surely not something in the same league of importance as, say, fire, the wheel, writing, powered flight, the hammer, steel, math, or even Quicksort.

Based on the simple reality that bitcoin wouldn't exist without them, we can find a couple seminal papers of cryptography that had way more impact than this white paper. To name a few :

Claude Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication: https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shanno...

Rivest, Shamir and Adelman's Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems: https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Rsapaper.pdf

Diffie and Hellman's New Direction in Cryptography: https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/publications/24.pdf

And that's the first three that come to my mind.

Yes.

For absolutely everything else, blockchain is a worse solution than technology that already existed before.

The interesting part of bitcoin was the “permission-less BFT algorithm” (because other algorithm at the time required to know the list of nodes up-front) through proof of work and game theory”.

The game theory part is only applicable to Austrian-style (scarce money) crypto-“currencies”, not to other cases of byzantine generals problem (it only works because everybody has financial incentives in the robustness of the system), and even in that specific niche, the proof of work scheme has been abandoned by pretty much everybody else in favor of proof of stakes (which isn't really a permission-less system anymore).

It's like building a bridge that can withstand the earth being swallowed by the sun. Sure the bridge will survive but that's pointless, and the energy and material being spent on that bridge has a billion better uses.

Satoshi combined them together in a novel form, for sure, but it’s still largely useless.