Bitcoin might well be the biggest invention in open internet protocols since BitTorrent. BT was a society changing tech, i consume most of my content via this protocol today.
Before that was probably email;
In that one could send an instant post card to any address on a decentralized network of mail servers, bypassing the USPS, etc.
BTC been on HN since the launch, and the community has been mostly negative — most users didn’t see the point compared to the incumbent technologies. But I have live it, and watched the corruption and theft of savings by bank and government in multiple jurisdictions; when I saw that you could store value over time using the same technology as public key cryptography — a core privacy technology, I knew this would reshape society, in the same way that public key cryptography reshaped communication in the 90s. It was such a powerful tech that governments of the world wanted to stop it! Ban large keys under export law! Illegal numbers! Outlawed algorithms!
We see the same thing decades later at a different layer of the human stack, the economic layer.
Nothing is truly new, just a mix of that which came before.
We are now seeing lots of people building software and protocols to try to recreate this, but they miss certain key points of why the protocol works. Bitcoin is a special protocol, in that nothing has been able to recreate the mindshare, effort and energy since it’s creation.