[throwaway613834]

Is there more to consensus and decentralization than just pinging a few other computers and picking the longest chain you find?

And proof of work is literally just the hash having a certain number of zero bits, right? Definitely a neat idea but hardly revolutionary if that's all there is to it.

[mbrock]

Something can be "revolutionary" and made up of pieces not in themselves groundbreaking. Linux was revolutionary and it was just a Unix clone for IBM PCs.