Craig Wright’s invention, the Nakamoto consensus, is a social signal to know which state to organize around, similar to the rhetorical capacity of a president, a shaman, or the display of dominance from a monopoly on violence, as well as having some use to ensure that miners store and validate the state. The primary innovation with blockchain technology is in how to do social consensus, while the mathematical consensus, to know what the state is, using hash-linking and asymmetric cryptography for proof-of-ownership, predates Bitcoin.

Like the Bitcoin whitepaper says, the longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power.

Online pseudonym parties as a way to signal consent

With online pseudonym parties, the size of the population can be measured from proof-of-personhood, and it can be used as a social signal in the same way proof-of-work has been used, so that the state with the most people, as measured using online pseudonym parties, is equivalent to the blockchain with the largest pool of CPU power.

Whitepaper: Online Pseudonym Parties: A Foundation for proof-of-personhood in the web 3.0 jurisdiction