To this day, I have not understood what exactly is even being calculated, and for what real world application. I mean, I understand mostly what crypto is and how it works, but not why doing those calculations results in financial gain.
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.
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
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 (and, as a fraction of a fraction of the work, process a blockchain transaction) are the best they could think of.
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.
It’s called “proof of work” because it’s difficult to find a suitable value, but it’s trivial to check that it’s correct. you just need the nonce. so by presenting that nonce to everyone, you’ve proved that you “did the work”.
as for the reason why they do this, if each block’s hash is dependent on the hash of the block before it, it means the entire chain is resistant to tampering. you can’t insert a block in the middle without recalculating the entire chain.
Yeah, so you end up with a fraction of a fraction of the work time going to actually doing the block chain transaction, and the vast majority going into the artificial difficulty
To this day, I have not understood what exactly is even being calculated, and for what real world application. I mean, I understand mostly what crypto is and how it works, but not why doing those calculations results in financial gain.
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.
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
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 (and, as a fraction of a fraction of the work, process a blockchain transaction) are the best they could think of.
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.
It’s called “proof of work” because it’s difficult to find a suitable value, but it’s trivial to check that it’s correct. you just need the nonce. so by presenting that nonce to everyone, you’ve proved that you “did the work”.
as for the reason why they do this, if each block’s hash is dependent on the hash of the block before it, it means the entire chain is resistant to tampering. you can’t insert a block in the middle without recalculating the entire chain.
Yeah, so you end up with a fraction of a fraction of the work time going to actually doing the block chain transaction, and the vast majority going into the artificial difficulty
yup, running a global network on top of something designed to be slow seems… inadvisable.