However, once a winning combination has been found, anyone can verify the block is valid by running the hash function just once. That makes a valid block something that requires an incredible amount of work to create but only a trivial amount of work to verify. The simple verification process is able to probabalistically prove the work was done, so

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Mining is designed to be a decentralized lottery. Each miner can create their own lottery ticket by creating a candidate block that includes the new transactions they want to mine plus some additional data fields. The miner inputs their candidate into a specially designed algorithm that scrambles (or “hashes”) the data, producing output that looks

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