Agreed, the issue is economic. That's one of the things that I find fascinating about Byzantine Fault Tolerant state machine replication. You can view cryptocur

Agreed, the issue is economic. That's one of the things that I find fascinating about Byzantine Fault Tolerant state machine replication. You can view cryptocurrencies as a method of payment for the economic incentive of playing fair. I think the big story here is that we can have a BFT distributed consensus! Also, I think those large primes do have economic value (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_known_prime_number#Prizes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_known_prime_number#Pri...). I'm not sure if that's the purpose of PrimeCoin or who would get the prize, but they nonetheless have some economic value.