What is Proof of Work?
Proof of work is a mining mechanism in which miners must use intense computational power to solve a puzzle to add a block to the blockchain.
Once it’s done, the “work” of the new blocks can be verified by other miners. Thus being, “Proof of Work”.
It also serves as a protection against bad actors who would wish to spam the network with false, meaningless transactions.
Miners do a process call “hashing” in where they use special mining machines to make guesses at which nonce will be included in the next block.
PoW creates a demand for artificial cost in a costless digital world. For someone to change or alter the blockchain’s record they must complete expensive computational work that would be cheap to prove and confirm.
After a nonce is found, the message is broadcasted to the entire network via the Blockchain and in this it is provable work and easily confirmed by others.
Proof of work comes with the benefit of security, because only transactions that users have expelled energy on make it to the blockchain.
Altering these transactions would require overpowering the majority of the network (51% attack) which would be no small feat.
