PROOF OF WORK

Proof of work is a consensus mechanism used to uphold the security and integrity of a blockchain, most famously for the Bitcoin protocol. Proof of work sets peers in the network against each other in a game to see who can correctly solve a computationally intensive puzzle the quickest. The winning peer obtains the right to update the state of the network (i.e. write the next transaction in the ledger) and broadcast that update for the rest of the peers to validate for correctness. Once the work is proved to be correct, the peer receives (i.e. mines) a token from the protocol as a reward.

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