The core innovation in the original paper by Satoshi Nakamoto is Proof of Work: A system where people secure the scarcity of a decentralized digital quantity by spending compute power in order to be rewarded units of the same digital quantity.

Proof of Work is ultimately a set of well-balanced design decisions employing well-known technology. Maybe that's why people have a hard time seeing the novelty in it: they just see a bag of individual technologies and miss the delicacy of the design.