They had to design a specialized verification function, which I imagine would be the easy way to break it.

The brilliant part of Bitcoin is that it uses very widely known crypto primitives - verification is the same as getting the right seed (you just happen to be told what the right seed is, rather than having to pay for it to be discovered).

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hyc_symas 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You must be on drugs. There is no separate specialized verification function. It's the same algorithm for verification as for mining.

	▲	tromp an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Correct; both Bitcoin and Monero use Hashcash as PoW, only differing in the choice of hash function. Verification is only different from a solution attempt in asymmetric (i.e. non-Hashcash) PoW, such as Cuckoo Cycle or (the poorly named) Equihash.

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fluffypony 12 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

lolwut. There is no specialised verification function.