The technology here is far greater than the sum of the parts (public key cryptography, hashing, etc). The innovation of the blockchain is distributed consensus, and none of the component technologies can provide that alone.
you're missing the point here dude; me and the other guy are just saying that it's a similar situation:
> X brought Y together into a nice package that people could get behind and use even though there wasn't obvious inherent value to those who were using the Z beforehand
"huh" doesn't really tell me anything about your understanding of my point. If you could specify what part of my statement doesn't make sense for you, I could at least try to clarify it.
>>X brought Y together into a nice package that people could get behind and use even though there wasn't obvious inherent value to those who were using the Z beforehand
If AOL provided a major innovation not available in either X or Y, then it would be analogous to the blockchain. The reason why AOL faded away and the blockchain won't is that the latter solves a major problem that could not be solved by any previous technology, including any of its component technologies alone, while the former did not.
A blockchain can only process its own data, no external api call allowed. Unfortunately a lot of interesting applications require access to external data. Thats what oracle are for. They import external data into the blockchains, embedded in transactions. Yes it does undermine the security model of the blockchain, but they are some work arounds. For example, you can have several oracles, and you can decided to only accept data that was provided by a majority of oracles, thus rejecting outliers.
i actually think it's a pretty good simile
its bringing a new tech development to the masses in a very clunky way - just what AOL did.