Читать книгу Cryptocurrency All-in-One For Dummies - Peter Kent, Kiana Danial - Страница 29

If you’re a miner and want to actually enter your block and transactions into the blockchain, you have to provide an answer (proof) to a specific challenge. This proof is difficult to produce (hence all the gigantic computers, time, and money needed for it), but others can very easily verify it. This process is known as proof of work, or PoW.

For example, guessing a combination to a lock is a proof to a challenge. Going through all the different possible combinations to come up with the right answer may be pretty hard, but after you get it, it’s easy to validate — just enter the combination and see whether the lock opens! The first miner who solves the problem for each block on the blockchain gets a reward. The reward is basically the incentive to keep on mining, and it motivates the miners to compete to be the first one to find a solution for mathematical problems. Bitcoin and some other mineable cryptocurrencies mainly use the PoW concept to make sure that the network isn’t easily manipulated.

This whole proof-of-work concept has some downsides for blockchain technology. One of the main challenges is that it wastes a lot of computing power and electricity just for the sake of producing random guesses. That’s why new cryptocurrencies have jumped on an alternative wagon called proof of stake (PoS), covered in the next section.