never before in human history have humans possessed a form of money which could not be confiscated, counterfeited, inflated, and could be sent across the world for practically nothing.
when the reference client gets the needed code for blockchain pruning so that bitcoin could sustain visa's transaction rate (along with the ability to bootstrap new clients) one of the most important innovations of the 21st century will be complete.
This will happen almost instantaneously with the global realization Nash is satoshi.
the amount of techniques combined to create bitcoin really forms an evolution of 300 years of math and cryptography.
from the study of elliptic curves in the 18th century to the realization in the 1980's that a strong public key algorithm can be created by using the group of points on an elliptic curve.
Diffie and Hellman's 1970's idea of hash functions as a building block of a digital signature scheme.
the hashcash scheme as a proof of work proposed by Adam Back in 1997.
P2P networks popularized by Napster in 1999.
and of course Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper from November 2008 describing how to combine everything together to create the blockchain and bitcoin.
don't forget the letters to the nsa where nash explained he cannot be beat in the encryption war
http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/nash_letters/nash_letters1.pdfhis solutions for cooperative games
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/cs286r/courses/spring02/papers/nash50a.pdfAnd of course ideal money
http://sites.stat.psu.edu/~babu/nash/money.pdf in which he ties it all together and explains bit coin is a commodity for the public like water.
Then we should understand the relation to a paper on fluid dynamics
"Le problème de Cauchy pour les équations différentielles d'un fluide général"
And we might, if we are following well understand the relevence of a paper on singularities
http://www.imus.us.es/DC/2012_SA/php/Nash_Arcs-1.pdfAnd then embedding manifolds:
http://www.people.vcu.edu/~rgowdy/phys691/pdf/embed.pdf
