Probably what you meant but I still wanted to mention it: Bitcoin (or most PoW schemes) work like a lottery. Think of each attempt at generating a nonce below the required difficulty as a lottery ticket. The more nonces you generate (the more hashes per second you compute) the higher your chance of winning. The system works because people who spent lots of money on lottery tickets in the past (and maybe won one or two times) are incentivized to keep the lottery running in an honest manner (so their prize keeps its value - if they haven't spent it).
> Along these lines one of the more intriguing projects is called RandHound[1]. It's a way of creating distributed randomness (according to the paper's title). I think chains secured via lottery leader selection protocol has more promise than PoS.
Another notable mention is dfinity (dfinity.org). They have a very interesting technology stack and I'm hoping for discussions about it in the future on HN.