But we're in complete agreement and that's my point, he took something (HashCash) and found out that it could be used for something it wasn't meant to. That's w

But we're in complete agreement and that's my point, he took something (HashCash) and found out that it could be used for something it wasn't meant to. That's what's so clever about it. It's not like inventing elliptic curve cryptography designing the first internal combustion engine, it's taking something and realizing that it could be a lot more. It's not using a bread knife to cut something else, it's using a bread knife to create a more efficient battery. Or like using sleep as a sorting algorithm or figuring out that you could abuse the floating point representation to compute an inverse square root without actually having to compute a square root. I'm not trying to diminish the discovery, it's quite the contrary, I think its simplicity and elegance is what makes it so impressive. It's a very elegant solution to a very complex problem and you could explain it in a few minute to somebody with the right technical background.