[DigitalJack]

Hey said this about proof of work.. is it wrong? It sounded good to me, but I never got into blockchain stuff.

>What is proof-of-work? Proof-of-work is a system for establishing “decentralized consensus.”

Agreeing about the order of events is very difficult in computer networks, especially if you can’t trust the other computers involved. Unfortunately, it’s also very hard to establish trust in a global network which aims to provide open participation. So, we need a way to agree on the order of events without establishing trust.

Proof-of-work solves that problem by putting the network on a trustworthy clock. It’s a kind of computation which takes a predictable amount of time to run, and which can’t be forged by a bad actor.

With proof-of-work, you can have multiple computers make additions to a blockchain without having them trust each other. That’s decentralized consensus.

Decentralized consensus is intended to mean that one entity can’t control the blockchain network. Any newcomer can participate, and ownership is equally distributed among the participants.

[runeks]

> Proof-of-work solves that problem by putting the network on a trustworthy clock. It’s a kind of computation which takes a predictable amount of time to run, and which can’t be forged by a bad actor.

That’s not right. PoW takes a completely unpredictable amount of time. It’s not about a clock ticking, it’s about making the presence of two incompatible versions of history as expensive as possible, thus forcing the network into consensus.

[dozzie]

There's more wrong statements in the quote, like blockchain solving consensus (it's not, it's a document timestamping).