People have been writing about consensus since the very beginning of Bitcoin, and long before that. These are not new ideas, at least not to anyone paying the

People have been writing about consensus since the very beginning of Bitcoin, and long before that. These are not new ideas, at least not to anyone paying the slightest attention to cryptocurrency development. It's just about all Vitalik writes about now, and is the motivation for essential designs like Ethereum's ICE AGE. Social consensus, however, doesn't affect the standard 'malicious' double-spend cheat. You're not going to get social consensus forming around an obvious 'criminal' behavior. It's only going to happen around political issues like network governance/rules (like the DAO), technical bugs (like BTC forks), or global political issues (Satoshi Dice blacklist?). Considering this a criticism of cryptocurrencies is inane. We're all just apes shouting at each other about value. We can just as easily blacklist or boycott each other outside of any kind of value-information network to achieve the same effect; recognizing that this behavior can become part of the network is trivial. Social/political elements will always be the ultimately arbiter precisely because human assessments of value aren't physical or mathematical realities. This is overwhelmingly obvious when stated explicitly, but for whatever reason this is seen as some sort of 'gotcha!' Bitcoin still achieves an entirely novel way for humans to communicate information about value. It is still qualitatively different from anything that has come before precisely because it is reliably a consensus mechanism. Nakamoto consensus is the innovation, yet many do not understand this consensus.