This series continues to translate the original white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto to plain language. The goal is to have easily shared content, and send new people directly to nostr to read it. The original content will be posted, with the plain language below.
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Tx - transaction
nonce - number only used once
4. Proof-of-Work Paragraph 2
For our timestamp network, we implement the proof-of-work by incrementing a nonce in the block until a value is found that gives the block’s hash the required zero bits. Once the CPU effort has been expended to make it satisfy the proof-of-work, the block cannot be changed without redoing the work. As later blocks are chained after it, the work to change the block would include redoing all the blocks after it.
Plain Language
Imagine you have a lockbox, protected by a special lock. This lock is a challenge – it only opens if you can find the secret number. The catch is: the secret number has to have a specific number of zeros at the beginning.
The chances of guessing the right number are currently 1 in 4,294,967,296.
To find this secret number, you start with another number called a "nonce" and keep trying different ones(nonce numbers) until you discover the secret number that makes the lock open with the correct number of zeros at the beginning of the number. Once you find it, you lock the lockbox with this specific number.
Find the secret number, lock the lockbox using that number.
The next part: once the computer has gone through all the effort to find the right number, it locks the lockbox, making it very difficult for anyone to change it. If someone wants to attack the lockbox, they would have to redo all the work you did, finding the secret number.
If your lockbox is part of a group of lockboxes, chained together(blockchain), changing one would mean redoing all the work for every lockbox in the chain. This gives the network, and the information very high security.
There is currently no ability, or incentive, to try to attack this system. To break this system, a tremendous amount of resources would have to attack every single device on the planet that has a copy of this information.
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