Great read.
"What is a new idea — what Satoshi figured out — is how to independently agree upon a history of events without central coordination. He found a way to implement a decentralised timestamping scheme that (a) doesn’t require a time-stamping company or server, (b) doesn’t require a newspaper or any other physical medium as proof, and (c) can keep the ticks more-or-less constant, even when operating in an environment of ever-faster CPU clock times."