3
Proof of Work
Peter Harpending edited this page 2026-03-17 11:37:58 -07:00

Proof of Work

In the "hold a competition" case of Leader Selection we need a special kind of puzzle that has a few important properties:

  1. Difficult to solve, but easy to verify. A human-type puzzle that fits this description would be a jigsaw puzzle: it takes a long time to figure out where all the pieces go, but once complete anyone can check whether it is correctly solved by merely glancing at it.
  2. Given a set of equally powerful contenders, the outcome should be random.