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Cryptology Academy · Lesson

Proof of Work: Mining & Difficulty Adjustment

Implement a PoW miner and understand nonce search and target difficulty.

What Is Proof of Work?

Proof of Work (PoW) requires a block producer to perform a computationally expensive task to add a block. This deters spam and makes chain rewriting expensive. Verifying the proof is cheap (one hash). Work requires many hash computations.

The Mining Challenge

Bitcoin PoW: find a nonce such that SHA256d(block_header) < target. The target is a 256-bit number. A smaller target means more leading zeros required in the hash output, making valid nonces rarer and harder to find.

All lessons in this course

  1. Hash Chains & Block Linking
  2. Merkle Trees: Transaction Integrity at Scale
  3. Proof of Work: Mining & Difficulty Adjustment
  4. Bitcoin Script & UTXO Signature Verification
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