you’re calculating the sha256 (i think) hash of the previous transaction block’s hash plus your block of transactions. What’s making it proof-of-work though, is the stipulation that “the hash has to start with at least five zeroes”, with “five” being an adjustable difficulty value. To be able to get that specific hash an otherwise meaningless number (a “nonce”) is included, and by increasing this number by one you can change the hash value.
so basically, all these servers are running hash calculations on the same thing over and over again with a single number changing between runs until they get an “approved” hash value. whoever gets there the fastest gets their block added to the chain, then everyone else has to start over with that hash as the “previous” one.
apotheotic@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
There is not useful work being done. They may as well be crossword puzzles. Some coins do use the work to do useful things, but bitcoin does it as a way of “proving your work” to earn coin.
GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
I suspected that, but why the hell is “proof of work” nothing of any use or value? That just seems so fundamentally absurd it doesn’t compute for me apparently
apotheotic@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
I always thought it would be ideal to do this to create a powerful distributed computing network that can both serve to process the transactions made with the coin and also to do something useful, like folding@home or seti@home or whatever. But apparently nope, GPU crossword puzzles that do nothing but use electricity to make heat are the best they could think of.