I all the time thought it refers back to the methodology of resolving conflicts inside a blockchain community’s consensus specification:
If there are a number of variations of blocks which might be deemed legitimate by nodes consensus guidelines, however attempting to increase the chain from the identical ascendant block, then the model with highest cumulative proof-of-work (blockchain tip’s chainwork) shall be thought of as the proper model.
That is it.
All different makes use of of the time period “Nakamoto Consensus” are abusing the time period. It is NOT a governance methodology or something like that.
Nodes operating a consensus-breaking specification would merely ignore PoW of the opposite chain and create a hard-fork, the place every blockchain community would have their very own Nakamoto Consensus recreation, and never affecting one another.
In the event that they shared the PoW algorithm, then the networks could be bidding for a similar sorts of hashes, e.g. sha256d miners would allocate their hash-rate to search out steadiness with sha256d networks block rewards market worth.
That is merely a free-market mechanism and NOT Nakamoto Consensus.
PoW miners are suppliers of hashes, blockchain networks are consumers of hashes. It is a enterprise transaction. Each fee-paying transaction is a enterprise transaction with a miner, after all they’d mine their very own transactions – in any case, every transaction is a fee for his or her hashes on high of the block reward subsidy.