Get the weekly summary of crypto market analysis, news, and forecasts! This Week’s Summary The crypto market ends the week at a total market capitalization of $1,070 trillion. Bitcoin is down by nearly 2% after intense seesawing this week. Ethereum increased by almost 2% over the past seven days. XRP lost more than 1% in value this week. Almost all altcoins are trading in the red, with a few exceptions. The DeFi sector decreased the total value of protocols (TVL)…
What is Proof of Work (PoW)
Proof of Work (PoW) is a protocol to achieve distributed consensus in cryptocurrency or other decentralized systems. It is an algorithm used to secure the network by requiring the users to perform a certain amount of work to participate in the network. This work usually involves solving a mathematical problem, which is computationally difficult to solve but easy to verify once it has been solved.
The way PoW works are as follows:
- A new transaction is broadcast to the network and added to a pool of unconfirmed transactions (also called the “mempool”).
- Miners pick up transactions from the mempool and create a new block by adding them to a list of transactions, along with a special transaction called a “coinbase” transaction that rewards the miner with a certain number of cryptocurrency units.
- The miner then calculates the block’s hash, a unique code derived from the block’s contents. The hash must meet certain criteria, such as having a certain number of leading zeros.
- If the hash meets the criteria, the block is considered valid and added to the blockchain, which is a public ledger of all transactions on the network. If the hash does not meet the criteria, the miner must try again by changing the “nonce” value, a random number included in the block, and used to alter the hash.
- The miner continues to try different nonce values until a valid hash is found, which can take a lot of time and computational power. This process is called “mining” and requires the miner to perform a certain amount of work to participate in the network.
- Once a block has been mined and added to the blockchain, the transactions in the block are considered to be confirmed.
The PoW protocol secures the network by making it difficult for an attacker to alter the blockchain or create fraudulent transactions. This is because an attacker would need to redo the work of all the miners to alter a block, which would require a lot of computational power and be impractical.
In conclusion, the PoW protocol is a way to achieve distributed consensus in a decentralized system by requiring users to perform a certain amount of work to participate in the network.