It's also basically the only way to have a permissionless verification system that is resistant to sibyl attacks.
A sibyl attack, is where in an anonymous system, one person can easily pretend to be millions of people. If we had some magical way to prevent people from doing this, without having to verify their identity, and manually add them to a list of "trusted verifiers", we could do away with PoW.
A sibyl attack, is where in an anonymous system, one person can easily pretend to be millions of people. If we had some magical way to prevent people from doing this, without having to verify their identity, and manually add them to a list of "trusted verifiers", we could do away with PoW.