Now we're moving the goalposts from:

> 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.

It seems that some people really build their world around one element, and become obsessed about it that they make outlandish claims about its utility.

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.

> You're going to claim you're certain that a solution to the Byzantine generals problem will have no useful consequences?

Yes.

The one thing that blockchain is good at is cryptocurrencies. Whether we want cryptocurrencies or not is a separate question (I don't).

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

I like bitcoin. I use it. It's cryptobro nonsense to claim anything to do with it is in the 'top 100 non-literary' documents ever produced by humanity.

Solutions to the Byzantine generals problem have been long known before that (PBFT was in 1999 for instance).

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).

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies only solve the byzantine generals problem inside of the blockchain itself. The second anything has to touch the real world you are right back to needing trust. It's robust against a pointless thing.

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.