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 that it innovates the field of social consensus mechanisms.

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.

Deterrents as a consensus mechanism, vs rewards

The direct impact on the utility of the slaves themselves of this condition represented a terrible economic cost. And there was also an opportunity cost to the broader economy, which lost out on the potential human capital and entrepreneurial contributions slaves might have made as free workers. Economies which used slavery may, in the long run, have been at a disadvantage.

The human brain is capable of "memetic cognition", tough operates on top of genetic imperatives that are deeply rooted, both evolutionarily and within the brain, and consciousness. The use of deterrents and dominance acts on lower systems in the brain, the reptilian brain and the paleo-mammalian brain, and tough having efficacy in forming a consensus has a high utility cost.

Memes that spread through fear, and consensus trances

The monopoly on violence as a consensus mechanism favours replication of memes that propagate by threatening annihilation of the genes, as well as its opposite, those promising “eternal life” or "being saved", transhumanism, psychiatric science, and middle-age Catholicism with letters of indulgence being prime examples. With proof-of-work, "consensus technology" and reward-based co-ordination, an increase in demand-and-control means that

References

1. Did slavery make economic sense? - The Economist, 2013