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
So then the innovation of cryptocurrency was an economic one.
It does have the word "currency" in it, so that should not be surprising.