Right, the only "new" thing is using PoW as an /economic incentive/ because PoW was previously used for plenty of things during the cipherpunk movement as well.

Right, the only "new" thing is using PoW as an /economic incentive/ because PoW was previously used for plenty of things during the cipherpunk movement as well. Fair point about it being distributed The Proof of Work solves a separate problem, that of Double-Spending. The Proof of Work here isn't arbitrarily to slow the system itself down, just to slow non-canonical histories. But that itself is not the "blockchain" (thus the "how do you define it?" question, I'm curious to hear your take), I'm just playing devil's advocate: A lot of people who weren't around in the 70s are now calling verified logs a "blockchain", now it is a stupid buzzword, but at what point do we consolidate the word for an idea, versus argue there are semantic differences?