Ask HN: How does mining difficulty help Bitcoin? - febin
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carlsborg
Proof 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.

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brucephillips
Huh? BTC doesn't have spam.

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coralreef
Spamming the network with low value transactions?

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brucephillips
I guess you could call that spam. Proof of work has nothing to do with it
though.

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coralreef
Proof 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.

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dukeflukem
Without 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.

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brucephillips
This. Proof of work means votes are apportioned according to computing power,
making it prohibitively expensive for an attacker to double spend.

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kleer001
Along with decreasing reward size increasing mining difficulty creates a
selection pressure, a rising bar of difficulty that weeds out the weak.

