ELI5: POW (Introduction)

I really enjoy the Steem community. Most everyone here is a crypto enthusiast and I would say possess above average intelligence. When you say things like "proof-of-work," "proof-of-stake," "blockchain," or any other crypto trigger word people seem to know what you are talking about. No explanation is required. Everyone has done their homework already.

This is really nice, because a lot of the mainstream articles out there about crypto spend half of their time simply trying to explain the fundamentals to their target audience. They can't say things like, "ASIC," "51% attack," "DAO," "Distributed Ledger," or "Node," without then spending three paragraphs explaining what the thing is. Even then many crypto-uneducated consumers are left wondering what they just read.

Try to talk like that in the real world and people look at you like you're taking crazy pills. Half of the people I talk to "on the street" don't even know what cryptocurrency is. I have to ask them if they've heard of Bitcoin. At least they've heard of the top dog. Before Bitcoin hit $20K most would have said, "No." That's the silver lining of this bear market.

The average person, even my own friends, can't wrap their head around how crytpo could possibly be worth money. I couldn't even convince one friend (who's been a programmer for decades) of the importance of this new paradigm.

Everyone thinks it's a silver bullet. It can't kill every problem.

I disagree. Solving the problem of greed and incentivizing good behavior in this messed up economy will solve all the problems. The love of money is the root of all evil, but that is a topic for another post.

The concept of Internet cash being printed out of thin air boggles the mind of most, myself included. I had to do hours and hours of research before it finally started making sense to me. Most people on this planet will never do this much research on crypto in their entire life, just like most of us will never know how our smartphones or cars work. Technology is advancing so exponentially that everyday we find ourselves less and less able to comprehend the world around us.

In the end, we care more about functionality than we do about how the function is actually accomplished from a scientific perspective. It's much easier to use the Google Maps app than it is to know how it works. This is the purpose of front-end tech: constantly simplify the user experience so that the barrier to entry becomes trivial. This is something that the cryptophere desperately needs to realize.

I've read a few books by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. One of the plot devices I remember was that ancient technology that was so old and reliable, that by the time it started breaking down no one even knew how it worked. The old tech was much better than the new tech because the amount of specialization and organization it took to make the old tech was lost due to a repeating galactic catastrophic event (much like if the dinosaurs went extinct, but on a galactic scale).

I still wonder if such a future will happen, but it definitely seems possible given how technology is advancing compared to a few hundred years ago and beyond. In the future, it might take 1000 people, each specializing in their own field for 10 years, to come together and make a product that literally no one will understand. The mind boggles at the thought.

Lucky for us, crypto isn't that complicated, even if it is complicated enough to the point that most people will never know how it works. But, as I've already pointed out, you don't have to understand a technology to use it.

I've tried to explain the proof-of-work consensus algorithm so many times that I've begun to realize it needs to be simplified as much as possible. The barrier to entry must be as low as possible or newcomers will immediately be turned off by the complexity of it all.

This was meant to be that post but my introduction is now the length of an entire post, so I guess I'll split it into two parts. I took a refresher course on POW and actually learned a thing or two.

I did not know what a nonce (number only used once) was. Even though I've seen this term a dozen times I've never bothered to look it up.

Turns out, a nonce is the number that the mining software changes in order to change the hash output. I always assumed that the order of the transactions in a block was modified to accomplish this. Nope! It's weird that even I, someone who spends 3 hours a day researching and blogging about crypto, would find something out about the basic functionality of the blockchain. 'Just goes to show you how complicated the space is and how much it needs to be simplified in order for people to make sense of it.

This is the tutorial I used as a refresher course.

I'll be trying to simplify the explanation even further in my next post.