The Bitcoin whitepaper. It started my curiosity in the computer security industry (employed for 5 years now) and the rabbithole of trying to understand every design decision behind the cryptosystem.
Nice! It's really well written. I have followed a similar path, but for me, the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" [0] paper was the one that sent me down the rabbit-hole.
The Bitcoin whitepaper is one of my cherished reads. The other is the BitTorrent whitepaper. Both technologies changed the technical and non-technical worlds, and the fundamental protocols are clearly explained in their respective papers.
Agree with your assessment of cryptocurrencies in general but having seen the adoption of Bitcoin in authoritarian and inflationary regimes, the world most certainly does need access to a digital peer-to-peer currency that is censorship-resistant and virtually immune to debasement.
Even if you argue that Bitcoin as it has evolved has flaws, it is the best implementation we’ve come up with so far. Like democracy, it isn’t perfect but it is much better for its use case than anything else we have come up with to date.
It took a while for the tinfoil-hat stance on privacy to catch on, but it's safe to say that today it has lost its fringe status. Similarly, it might still be years before we see widespread acceptance of the importance of an unrestricted, global value-transfer mechanism.
