Every blockchain claim — "this transaction is final," "this address owns this asset," "this history hasn't been altered" — ultimately reduces to a handful of cryptographic primitives doing narrow, well-defined jobs. None of them are blockchain inventions. Hash functions, digital signatures, and Merkle trees predate Bitcoin by decades. What blockchains did was combine them into a system where no single party has to be trusted for any of those claims to hold.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://namefi.io/r/en/blog/blockchain-cryptographic-primitives