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Blockchain Developer's Guide
book

Blockchain Developer's Guide

by Brenn Hill, Samanyu Chopra, Paul Valencourt, Narayan Prusty
December 2018
Beginner to intermediate
564 pages
17h 34m
English
Packt Publishing
Content preview from Blockchain Developer's Guide

Proof of Work

The first consensus algorithm used in blockchains was Bitcoin's proof-of-work (PoW). Proof-of-work fundamentally functions by exploiting a feature of certain cryptographic functions: there are mathematical problems that are very hard to solve, but once they are solved, they are very easy to check. As discussed before, one of these problems is hashing: it's very easy to take data and compute a hash from it, but extremely difficult to take a hash and discover the input data. PoW is most notably used by Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum.

PoW has the following characteristics:

  • Relatively predictable time to solution: Bitcoin's network protocol expects each block to take about ten minutes to solve. If the network starts to solve the ...
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