The "innovation" in the original blockchain is that it is computationally expensive on purpose, to create "economic value". There is no computer science innovation there. Computer scientists didn't come up with the idea because it made no sense.

And it all went downhill from there.

No, the goal wasn't to create economic value. The goal was to make it prohibitively expensive to recreate the chain and thus fool someone else. Satoshi did not say that the purpose of PoW was to "create economic value".

And a digital signature couldn't be used because?

A digital signature alone cannot prevent double spending

No, going back in the list of transactions can.

not only is this provably wrong, but the entire point is also negated through the merge which this post is about.

But cryptocurrency doesn't really solve these in a technically interesting way, as it's neither consistent nor available under partition. The pressure to keep the chain consistent and unified is a purely social one - your BTC is only valuable to other people on the same chain as you.

I don't know, looking into the papers that are written in crypto research, especially in academia, it seems like there is a lot of very technically interesting stuff going on, especially with zero knowledge proofs for example...

These are largely (if not completely) applications of existing zero-knowledge algorithms to blockchain data, not the application of blockchains to solve some difficult ZK problems or make a useful-outside-of-blockchain novel ZK construction.

And? Applications of research brings new insights into that thing.

> The pressure to keep the chain consistent and unified is a purely social one

So then the innovation of cryptocurrency was an economic one.

It does have the word "currency" in it, so that should not be surprising.

I'll leave the question of whether it's economically interesting to economists and sociologists (though I suspect the answer is it's not at least in this regard, as the pressure to use the same non-blockchain currency seems not too different across the sweep of history). The claim was:

> It turns out that "distributed linked list" is actually a difficult problem that involves very interesting challenges

It's not that.

> It's not that.

Are you saying it's easy? The PoS algorithms I've read seem quite complicated, and honestly quite interesting. Also there is a lot of academic research about this stuff, some of it private, some of it public.

I mean, I know there are people out there who think that, for example, particle physics is totally uninteresting, and you are of course free to decide that a given research area is totally uninteresting, but you can't expect others to agree. It is just your opinion