This is a lovely faq and quite informative, however I'd feel a lot better if there were peer-reviewed papers by researchers with some prior work on Byzantine Fault Tolerance.
It's worth pointing out that Byzantine fault tolerance has been around for almost 40 years, and yet it wasn't until bitcoin that you could build a decentralized currency that people felt confident in.
Academic Byzantine fault tolerance is insufficient, because you cannot naively assume that most participants will behave honestly. They have to have an incentive to behave honestly, and there can be no room for dishonest behavior that would be more rewarding.
There's a reason that it took so long to get a working digital cash - a new breakthrough was needed and that breakthrough ended up being Proof of Work.
To trust a new system for decentralized money, I would want to see peer review not just from academics, but also from the leading bitcoin experts, who in my opinion are the only ones that really understand cryptocurrency.
It's true, it's an old field that remains (I think) in progress. I just fear that the confidence in decentralized currency you cite may be overly influenced by the profit early proponents have earned.
Perhaps a few academic collaborations could generate peer-reviewed papers that leverage those decades of research alongside the practical experience of bitcoin experts.
