What Is the Role of a Nonce in the Proof-of-Work Mining Process?
A nonce (Number Used Once) is a variable number that miners repeatedly change and input into the hashing algorithm along with the block data. The goal is to find a nonce value that, when hashed with the block data, produces a resulting hash that meets the network's current difficulty target (e.g. starts with a certain number of zeros).
Finding this valid nonce is the "work" in Proof-of-Work, and it is a trial-and-error process.
