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39 lines
1.6 KiB
Markdown
39 lines
1.6 KiB
Markdown
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title: Proof of Work | Monero Documentation
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---
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# Proof of Work
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> Proof of work is a way to legitimize untrusted party
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### What exactly is proof of work?
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Proof of work is a cryptographic proof that untrusted party committed significant computational resources to solve artificial problem.
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Technically, the "proof" is simply a solution to the problem at hand.
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### It's all about legitimizing untrusted party
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How an untrusted party on the Internet could earn any level of your trust?
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It can prove its commitment by solving agreed computationally hard problem.
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For example, by requiring untrusted party to perform a hard computation before you accept their connection, you limit connections only to "committed" parties.
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In another example, you could require PoW to be attached to incoming e-mails to make spam prohibitively expensive.
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### Work must be otherwise useless
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The work on and solution to "computationally hard problem" cannot be useful in any other way than to prove the commitment.
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If the work is useful elsewhere then it doesn't prove commitment to you.
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The problem must be artificial. Otherwise incentives are skewed and the whole scheme breaks.
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### Strong asymmetry
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The requirement for proof of work scheme is strong asymmetry for work vs verification resources.
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The work must be arbitrarily hard. At the same time proof verification must remain dirt cheap (in terms of computational resources).
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Cheap verification is critical because at this stage we are dealing with potentially huge number of untrusted parties,
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who could DoS the verifier by submitting invalid proofs. Such proofs should be trivial to discard.
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