Well, whether or not you agree, there is some newness.

The Okamoto-Ohta scheme might seem like handing out gift card codes to people as payment to you, but there are interesting mathematical properties to it that move responsibility further up the ladder than simply saying you're SOL if you've been handed a spent card number.

If you hold BTC you might not want to hear that Bitcoin has faults, but it does.

Outside of practical problems, it's labeled as a cryptocurrency but the design of it, besides wallet keys, uses little cryptography. The scheme of signing cash values to anonymize spenders' identities unless counterfeiting occurs involves much more cryptographic math. If you try to research this field on Wikipedia for instance, only 'decentralized' cryptocurrencies are explained in the cryptocurrencies article, which involve little cryptographic math. Even if you think what I'm describing is ancient history, it is not well known to everyone.

Proof of work itself is not very much based in cryptography, even if it's implemented with hash functions, so the real breakthrough (on the crypto side) is signing accounts with public/private keys which isn't revolutionary to anyone who has used RSA before.

Bitcoin is revolutionary like bittorrent is, and in this case I'm not interested in the P2P implementation. I do understand its value to users of Bitcoin, however. But in some ways, beyond its implementation which is quite complicated, the block chain itself is completely centralized, while the miners are decentralized.

A scheme with issuing banks might be centralized but I'd rather call it ad hoc.

Credit cards and smart cards place trust in a different position than electronic cash. It provides identity information to the merchant, and can allow the merchant to set the price of the transaction. It's also possible to reverse charges or overdraw accounts. The case of double-spending in the Ot-Oh is an instance of fraud and the perpetrator is then identified. This is a completely unique mathematical argument, and yes it is new, if it hasn't been implemented in the 25 years since it was discovered.

The two sides of this argument are what is more important: the mathematical basis or the software implementation.

It also might be the case that what you are entertaining is the discussion of a currency and what I want to discuss is the implementation of a digital form of exchange.

So, if Bitcoin Bank A issues Bank A digital cash, backed by Bitcoin, then merchants or friends that accept bank A's digital cash can make offline transactions with digital currency in the way explained above with specific programs or devices. Starting accounts would require more than using Bitcoin, ie. providing identifying information like SSN, but the commonplace use of the digital cash would be secure and convenient while being arguably more reliable/convenient than either cash or credit cards and faster than accepting Bitcoin transactions directly.

It might be hard to see because of how many uphill battles Bitcoin has had to fight, now that some sellers are willing to accept it, but there are many details to the hand-to-hand transactions that aren't convenient, like messing up fees or needing to wait for blocks to be accepted. Waiting 10 minutes for a charge to pass before getting something out of a vending machine, for example, or having your card information stolen by a faulty vending machine card reader for your run-of-the-mill credit card.

The truth is both BTC and other digital cash forms have the same problem - there are no chargebacks. So if you purchase something at a distance with either, there's no way for a refund if someone runs off with your money.

So to summarize - yes, there are trade-offs between any implementation and there are differences between currencies and forms of currency, which are not totally exclusive, and I'm still learning about Bitcoin, so thanks for the information.