Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the engine under Bitcoin’s hood - the mechanism that keeps the network honest, secure, and decentralized. It’s how miners compete to add new blocks to the blockchain, and how Bitcoin prevents fraud without needing a central authority.

Here’s how it works: every 10 minutes or so, miners around the world race to solve a cryptographic puzzle. This puzzle takes serious computing power to crack, but once solved, the answer is easy for anyone to verify. The first miner to solve it earns the right to add the next block of transactions to the chain - and gets rewarded with newly minted bitcoin plus transaction fees.

This process is work, in the truest sense. It costs real-world resources - electricity, hardware, time. That’s the point. The difficulty of mining is what makes the system secure. You can’t fake it. You can’t cheat it. If someone tried to rewrite history or double-spend, they’d need to redo all the proof-of-work for every block - faster than the rest of the global network combined. Good luck with that.

Proof-of-Work also acts as a Sybil resistance mechanism. It ensures that participating in consensus requires skin in the game - no free rides, no sock puppets, no easy attacks.

It’s what transforms Bitcoin from an idea into an incorruptible monetary machine.

In simple terms: Proof-of-Work is how Bitcoin miners earn the right to update the ledger. It’s costly by design, easy to verify, and impossible to fake. It’s the foundation of Bitcoin’s trustless security.