Explain the Role of the Nonce in the PoW Difficulty Mechanism

The nonce (Number Once) is a variable number that miners repeatedly change and combine with the block header data to generate a new hash. The goal of mining is to find a nonce that, when hashed, produces a result that is less than the current network difficulty target.

This process is computationally intensive and is the core of the Proof-of-Work. The difficulty mechanism dictates the strictness of the hash requirement, meaning a miner must try many different nonces to find a valid one.