[leviself]

There really was no "traditional approach" to creating a distributed digital currency at the time. The blockchain is a product of Satoshi's thought and is the central innovation in bitcoin. The principal issue was not anonymity but making a network that didn't require third parties to prevent double-spending. Genuine technical problems that a lot of smart people hadn't been able to solve were solved by bitcoin.

Bittorrent was way easier because it was about copying, whereas a currency has to in a sense make copying impossible via some sort of time-stamping to prevent double-spend.