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I doubt that that's the one true answer. If I had been researching the topic at the time, I would have accepted eventual consensus. As somebody who has done research into algorithms, the reason why I would have disregarded Bitcoin's approach is that it's inherently terribly inefficient.

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Many cryptographic protocols are much less efficient. I asserted that only as someone who was in that space an personally knows the people who were doing research on this in the 90’s and 00’s. Nearly all effort was focused on finding a solution that had finality of settlement guarantees.

There was also some work on hashcash money, but it made the economically naive and inaccurate assumption that value of the currency must be linked to the cost of production, which is also explicitly not the case in bitcoin.

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