Never before in human history have humans possessed a form of money which could not be confiscated, counterfeited, inflated, and could be sent across the world for practically nothing.
when the reference client gets the needed code for blockchain pruning so that bitcoin could sustain visa's transaction rate (along with the ability to bootstrap new clients) one of the most important innovations of the 21st century will be complete.

the amount of techniques combined to create bitcoin really forms an evolution of 300 years of math and cryptography.
from the study of elliptic curves in the 18th century to the realization in the 1980's that a strong public key algorithm can be created by using the group of points on an elliptic curve.
Diffie and Hellman's 1970's idea of hash functions as a building block of a digital signature scheme.
the hashcash scheme as a proof of work proposed by Adam Back in 1997.
P2P networks popularized by Napster in 1999.
and of course Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper from November 2008 describing how to combine everything together to create the blockchain and bitcoin.


the only reason bitcoin is not yet getting the recognition it deserves is because the technology is so complicated and hard to explain to non technical people, and so most people can't really see the magnitude of technological progress that is being achieved here, but i am certain that in 100 years time the history books will tell the story of how a fusion of mathematics and cryptography changed the world.