Every 10 minutes, somewhere in the world, a Bitcoin miner finds a new block.
We all know transactions are in those blocks.
But what else?
Today, on this focus episode, I want to focus on exactly that.
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All right, so first up, we have the version number.
You can think of this as a software number.
Essentially, the miner is telling the network which rules this block is following or which version this Bitcoin block was mined under.
Recently, I did an episode with Bob Burnett where we talked about miner signaling.
And this is exactly where miners can signal by switching specific bits in that piece of data, what version they would like to see adopted going forward.
Next up, we have the previous block hash.
We're talking about a blockchain.
chain there needs to be something that links the chain pieces together links the blocks together
this is exactly that the previous block hash is included in the block header of the currently
being mined block to make sure that there is a reference to the last block and it's not possible
to mine the blocks by themselves this chain as we know goes all the way back to block zero and all
previous block hashes are included in every block along the way and so this makes sure that if
somebody wants to change something in the Bitcoin blockchain that they have to start right at the
beginning next up we have the Merkle root you can think of this as a hash that combines all the
transactions in the Bitcoin block so all the transactions get paired up and then hashed until So you reach the Merkle root and that is what is being included in the block header So what that does is that we don have to check every block individually as we go
but we can just check the Merkle root for any changes.
Because if one of the transactions included in this Bitcoin block changes,
even by a single digit, the entire Merkle root will also change.
Why we do this?
We do this for efficiency reasons.
If one of the Bitcoin transactions changes even by a single digit along the way, now the entire Merkle root hash changes as well.
So this makes sure that we only have to check the Merkle root instead of having to check constantly all the Bitcoin transactions that the miner selected for the block.
This is something we can explore in a separate focus episode where we can go into the Merkle root itself.
So next up, we have the timestamp.
This is just to signal to the network the time at which this block was created.
This is also used in difficulty computations to make sure that we're always reaching that 10-minute target.
So if the average difference between the blocks was higher or lower than 10 minutes, the difficulty adjusts accordingly.
So here, the Bitcoin network allows for some flexibility.
The timestamp cannot be more than two hours in the future and has to be after the median of the last 11 blocks.
The rules around the timestamp have to do with a specific attack on the Bitcoin mining network, which is another thing that we can explore in a separate focus episode.
After that, we have the difficulty target.
This is the target that the miner enters here to make sure that it follows the current difficulty target of the network that the nodes around the world agree on.
If this target is set incorrectly the block will not be accepted The lower the target is the more difficult it is to mine Bitcoin blocks the more difficult it is to find Bitcoin blocks and the higher it is the easier it becomes
This difficulty target is derived from the current difficulty, but the difficulty target
and the difficulty themselves are separate things. Last but not least, we have the nonce. This is the
bit of data that gets iterated, meaning this is the data that changes trillions of times a second.
If you own and run a miner with 270 tera hash, an S21 XP, for example, that means that that miner hashes 270 trillion times a second.
And that means it's changing the non-s 270 trillion times a second to arrive at a specific outcome that shows the network that you reached the difficulty target.
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worldwide shipping check out solomining.de today so after what i've just explained i want to go with
you guys to mempool.space to look at a block in more detail right so here we have all the previously
mined blocks you can do this until you reach block zero we're not going to do that it's going to take
a while right so the last block mind was block 940536 and we can see some basic data here right
so we can see the average fees that were paid we can see that it consisted of 1823 transactions
we can see the total fees here and when it was mined so 22 minutes ago if we click on that block
then we can see more details right so we can see what hash won this block right we can copy that and look at it in a separate file It a number that starts with a lot of leading zeros It a hexadecimal number So it includes letters as well
as numbers. We can see the timestamp at which it was mined, right? So 23 minutes ago, you can see
the size, weight, the health, another issue we can get into separately. You can see the fee span here
as well so the lowest fee was one set per vbyte and the highest fee paid was 600 sets 650 sets per
vbyte the median was about one currently fees are very very low so make sure that you clean house
and consolidate your transactions to avoid high fees later total fees paid 0.022 bitcoin subsidy
plus fees so that's 0.022 plus the current subsidy 3.125 bitcoin you can see total fees again and
then down here you have all the transactions right and notably you always have in every block the
first transaction is always the coin based transactions right so this is where bitcoin
enters the world previously held by the network and now dished out every 10 minutes currently 3.125
of Bitcoin being mined.
And that concludes it, right?
So to go back, we have in the block header,
we have the nonce, difficulty target, timestamp,
Merkle root, previous block hash, and the version.
And then the block itself consists of the block header
and the transactions.
So I hope that helped.
Let me know if you have any questions
or if anything remains, leave your comments down below.
I'm sure there is more details to be added
by you knowledgeable folks.
That being said, have a great day and a wonderful week.
See you later.