[tomjen3]

They had to design a specialized verification function, which I imagine would be the easy way to break it.

The brilliant part of Bitcoin is that it uses very widely known crypto primitives - verification is the same as getting the right seed (you just happen to be told what the right seed is, rather than having to pay for it to be discovered).

[hyc_symas]

You must be on drugs. There is no separate specialized verification function. It's the same algorithm for verification as for mining.

[tromp]

Correct; both Bitcoin and Monero use Hashcash as PoW, only differing in the choice of hash function. Verification is only different from a solution attempt in asymmetric (i.e. non-Hashcash) PoW, such as Cuckoo Cycle or (the poorly named) Equihash.

[fluffypony]

lolwut. There is no specialised verification function.