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PoW is a consensus mechanism used primarily in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
Repeatedly compute the hash of the block header, constantly modifying a parameter, until a hash value that matches the target is found; this is the core idea of the algorithm.
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Difficulty determines approximately how many computations are needed to complete one operation.
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Hash computation takes an input of any length and returns a fixed-length output; the generated hash is uniformly distributed.
Constant difficulty formula:
new difficulty = old difficulty * (time spent on last 2016 blocks / 20160 minutes)
target = max target / difficulty