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In both the Ethereum chain specification format and in Parity's documents on private chains, you see the term seal a block. What exactly does that term mean? How is it different than mining a block?

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2 Answers 2

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"Seal a block" is a proposed term to describe "mine a block" in a private chain. Private chains typically do not need to use proof-of-work mining, so a different term can be helpful. Specifics of what sealing means is up to a "seal engine", which is a proposed term to describe the consensus algorithm for a blockchain: one could describe that Ethereum currently uses a seal engine of Ethash, and has plans in the future to change the engine to Casper.

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Sealing is the generic term for mining for the core devs
I've asked the research slack and this was the answer:

Hi, What does it mean "to seal" a block? is this different than mining? E.g.: "libethashseal: generic wrapper around the POW block seal engine. " http://ethdocs.org/en/latest/ethereum-clients/cpp-ethereum/what-are-the-modules.html?highlight=seal

Eth-Gitter-Bridge @Eth-Gitter-Bridge 13:51 [Christian R] rolandkofler: It is the more generic term

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  • So what is a pre-sealed block?
    – R OMS
    Commented Aug 18, 2022 at 14:42

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