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Hashcash is a proof-of-work system used to limit email spam and denial-of-service attacks. Hashcash was proposed in 1997 by Adam Back and described more formally in Back's 2002 paper "Hashcash – A Denial of Service Counter-Measure". In Hashcash the client has to concatenate a random number with a string several times and hash this new string. It then has to do so over and over until a hash beginning with a certain number of zeros is found.

Wikidata facts

Official website
hashcash.org
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inception
1997-00-00
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~13 min read

Article

19 sections
Contents
  • Background
  • How it works
  • Technical details
  • Sender's side
  • Recipient's side
  • Required effort
  • Advantages and disadvantages
  • Applications
  • Bitcoin mining
  • Spam filters
  • Email clients
  • Email Postmark
  • Blogs
  • Reputation
  • Intellectual property
  • See also
  • Notes
  • References
  • External links

Hashcash is a proof-of-work system used to limit email spam and denial-of-service attacks. Hashcash was proposed in 1997 by Adam Back and described more formally in Back's 2002 paper "Hashcash – A Denial of Service Counter-Measure". In Hashcash the client has to concatenate a random number with a string several times and hash this new string. It then has to do so over and over until a hash beginning with a certain number of zeros is found.

==Background== The idea "...to require a user to compute a moderately hard, but not intractable function..." was proposed by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor in their 1992 paper "Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail".

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