As someone who was a developer well before Bitcoin was invented, yes, we did. Here's a conference from 1981 put on by the IEEE: https://www.iacr.org/archive/c

As someone who was a developer well before Bitcoin was invented, yes, we did. Here's a conference from 1981 put on by the IEEE: https://www.iacr.org/archive/crypto81/1_front_matter.pdf https://www.iacr.org/archive/crypto81/1_front_matter.pdf