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Ask HN: How does mining difficulty help Bitcoin?
- carlsborg 9y agoProof of work gives you spam resistance basically. Add a computational cost to do something to make it computationally expensive to do. Eg ddos protection, your browser needs to solve a hashing problem to proceed. It allows bitcoin to be decentralised (unordered message passing, eventually consistent nodes, no on off switch, no single point of failure) trust-less (no authority to complain to who can arbitrate or make changes), and resilient to attack .. all of this: in consensus on mining new blocks, in immmutability of the transaction history, in releasing new coins into the system at a predefined rate. To name some.
- brucephillips 9y agoHuh? BTC doesn't have spam.
- coralreef 9y agoSpamming the network with low value transactions?
- brucephillips 9y agoI guess you could call that spam. Proof of work has nothing to do with it though.
- coralreef 9y agoProof of works puts a real cost on confirming transactions in the form of computing power/electricity, preventing any miner from filling the blockchain with garbage, and economically incentivizing them to serve the network.
- carlsborg 9y agoSorry if I wasn't clear - I was only referring to spam and ddos protection to explain the concept of proof of work. Take the case of immutability of past transactions.. the computational cost to create the blockchain would be enormous.
- dukeflukem 9y agoWithout the difficulty increases you would get more blocks mined per hour as the mining hardware improves. At some point you'd have multiple chains at once that can grow quickly because its too easy to hash, so effectively forks.
- brucephillips 9y agoThis. Proof of work means votes are apportioned according to computing power, making it prohibitively expensive for an attacker to double spend.
- kleer001 9y agoAlong with decreasing reward size increasing mining difficulty creates a selection pressure, a rising bar of difficulty that weeds out the weak.