&gt; <i>You can have a blockchain without bitcoin, but why is that useful or interesting? Isn&#x27;t the Nakamoto distributed consensus the key innovation of bitcoin as a protocol?</i><p>What does the second have to do with the first? Just because bitcoin was the first to use it, doesn&#x27;t mean everything that uses same mechanism suddenly is &quot;Bitcoin&quot;, at least not in the commonly used sense.