And I totally forget to mention the GOAT Mark Miller (whom I disagree with on a lot of political stuff but damn do I respect the intelligence and technical vision!) who was working on smart contracts and a lot of digital money and ownership ideas decades before BTC was a twinkle in Nakamoto's eye.

And, of course, the blockchain itself wasn't developed for BTC, but by a couple of Bell Labs engineers in the 1980s, Haber and Stornetta, who wanted to figure out how to irrefutably authenticate digital information. (They cooked the idea up at a Friendly's restaurant in New Jersey -- the most important Friendly's in the history of computer science)