Proof of work, when POW was first invented, was used to prevent spam. After a while, it was used in the electronic cash system Under the surface, what the mining in POW is actually doing is converting kinetic energy (electricity) into an account block. A miner repeatedly runs the hash calculation until it solves a cryptographic problem. All hash operations are discarded, except for the hash value that solves the problem. This tiny hash value only takes very little energy to calculate, but it ...
