---
title: "PoW.Market — Brad Jasper"
description: "A market for proof of work: people posted puzzles on content, and miners raced to solve them, turning a Bitcoin hash into a signal of where attention should go."
url: https://bradjasper.com/projects/pow-market/
---

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# PoW.Market

Archived · 2020–2021 · Bitcoin

The site is offline.

A market for proof of work: people posted puzzles on content, and miners raced to solve them, turning a Bitcoin hash into a signal of where attention should go.

- [Archived site](https://web.archive.org/web/20210515011018/https://pow.market/)

![PoW.Market in 2021, after the rebuild: a band of blue and purple blocks for mined puzzles over a dark feed of pending magic numbers, with tag counts on the right](https://bradjasper.com/_astro/pow-market-screenshot-2021.BV1c-5Ae_1girKL.webp)

A Bitcoin hash is a costly signal: it proves that someone spent real energy on it. PoW.Market used that in an information network. Anyone could attach a proof-of-work puzzle to a piece of content, and miners raced to solve it. The work done on each item showed, without any central ranking, where people thought attention should go. That made it a market, and a testbed for decentralized ranking.

It was one of the projects that pushed me toward my later writing on consensus, self-sustaining networks, collective action, public goods and public choice:

- [The Zen of Saito](https://bradjasper.com/blog/the-zen-of-saito/)
- [Organizations 2.0](https://bradjasper.com/blog/organizations-2/)
- [Disintermediating Network Effects for Fun and Profit](https://bradjasper.com/blog/disintermediating-network-effects-for-fun-and-profit/)
- [The Future of Open Source Software](https://bradjasper.com/blog/the-future-of-open-source-software/)

I tested it with [Pow Pow](https://bradjasper.com/projects/powpow/), which fills the chain with test puzzles. In late 2020 I rebuilt it to be faster and cheaper to run, on [Hummingbird](https://bradjasper.com/projects/hummingbird/). The [Building on Bitcoin #2: Rebuilding PoW.Market](https://bradjasper.com/videos/building-on-bitcoin-2-rebuilding-pow-market/) video walks through the rebuild.

## Videos

[Building on Bitcoin #2: Rebuilding PoW.Market](https://bradjasper.com/videos/building-on-bitcoin-2-rebuilding-pow-market/) · Demo · December 2020 · [Watch on YouTube ↗](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEYgyJWOPRs)

[![PoW Market in 2020: "A Marketplace for Magic Numbers", with totals and a list of pending magic numbers](https://bradjasper.com/_astro/pow-market-screenshot-2020.CbmVVqfj_Z1a5xIC.webp)](https://bradjasper.com/_astro/pow-market-screenshot-2020.CbmVVqfj_Z1a5xIC.webp)

The first version, in 2020.