Glossary
Proof of work
Also called PoW
Agreement by spending energy on hash puzzles, as Bitcoin does.
Proof of work makes it expensive to propose blocks and expensive to rewrite history. Miners spend energy; the chain with the most accumulated work is treated as canonical. That is a security budget, not a moral argument about the climate, and not a price thesis.
It is one way to keep a ledger in sync. It is not the only way, and switching a live chain’s consensus is a social event as much as a technical one.
