Glossary · Mining Basics
Proof of work
Also: PoW
Proof of work is the consensus mechanism in which miners repeatedly hash candidate block headers until one produces a value below the network's current target, making each new block expensive to produce and cheap to verify.
Related terms
- Hashrate
- Hashrate is the number of hash attempts a miner or the whole network performs per second, quoted in terahashes (TH/s), petahashes (PH/s) or exahashes (EH/s), and it determines a miner's expected share of block rewards.
- Network difficulty
- Network difficulty is the number that sets how hard it is to find a valid Bitcoin block, adjusted every 2,016 blocks so that blocks keep arriving roughly every ten minutes as total hashrate changes.
- SHA-256
- SHA-256 is the cryptographic hash function Bitcoin uses for proof of work, producing a fixed 256-bit output from any input so that the only way to find a valid block is to try inputs one after another.
- Nonce
- The nonce is a 32-bit field in the block header that a miner changes between hash attempts so that each attempt produces a different hash, with the extra nonce in the coinbase transaction providing more room once the 4.3 billion values run out.
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