Cypherpunks were working on this since the 90s (or even 80s). There was a very active mailing list way back then with experiments and a lot of discussions. Bitcoin was revolutionary but it was built on top of a lot of existing work.
He has done a wonderful job of speculative fiction. Exposure to his work when i was a teenager definitely set me on my course to be who i am now.
Nothing against you, the work, or the author -- who, by all accounts including my own, deserves to be found in much better company than I have just implicitly placed him! Only that in both cases I think I would not much like the person I might have become for the radical influence of such a work.
for some of the history, i suggest reading markm's eulogy for norm hardy: https://erights.medium.com/norm-hardys-place-in-history-cecf... and this other bit of oral history: https://community.agoric.com/t/agoric-privacy-aspirations-ho.... also, this oral history interview with ann hardy, rip, who was the ceo of agorics and wrote the operating system that preceded keykos at tymshare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIWMvtM02NA (594 views)
the difficulty with smart contracts was figuring out how to decentralize them, and in particular how to decentralize payment, because an insecure smart contract isn't really a contract at all. previous efforts using centralized authorities (digicash, e-gold, peppercoin, mojonation, agorics itself, arguably tymshare) largely collapsed trying to negotiate the regulatory environment, though some failed in more conventional ways, like due to the innovator's dilemma. bitcoin found an inefficient but practically workable solution to the problem, which many of us had speculated was inherently unsolvable. satoshi's insight was to find a way to redefine the problem into something solvable, something many of us rejected for a long time. len sassaman famously rejected it until his death
like stross, i became disenchanted with the libertarian vision starting in the 90s, and abstained from bitcoin because i theorized that, if it worked, capitalism would destroy civilization. since then, my point of view has shifted due in part to moving to argentina, where i've been experiencing alternatives to capitalism, which make capitalism look pretty good by comparison
I think Nick Szabo coined 'smart contract' in his 1996 Extropy paper. He had worked at Agorics and I don't know how much of it is their influence; from my pov the agorics papers were extraordinary, while I kind of bounced off that particular Szabo paper. Before Agorics, there was Amix which MarkM called something like the first smart contract platform, retrospectively. (I visited the Amix office during an 80s visit to SF, btw, but I didn't know anything about them then. Current DeFi people might see it as a stretch to apply the same term.)
Speaking of Extropy, Accelerando's universe owes a whole lot more to the extropians list.