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A Complete Decoding of the Bitcoin Block
And also the block’s difficulty!
What’s behind all those fields in the Bitcoin block? You probably have already used a block explorer to check the status of a transaction or check wallet transactions or balance (yes, everything is super transparent in the blockchain), but what are all those fields and long numbers, right?
You don’t really need to know what are all those fields and long numbers. Just like an email user doesn't need to know how the internet and email protocols work from the technology perspective, a blockchain or Bitcoin user doesn’t really need to know how does it work to send a transaction. Nevertheless, it’s cool to understand what’s going on under the hood of the blockchain truck!
Firstly, let’s look at how a block is structured in the blockchain and then, we take a deeper look at some of the block’s components.
This is the first Bitcoin block mined in 2021. It was mined 13 minutes after New Year’s Eve. Although we will be looking at a Bitcoin block, most of the blockchains follow very similar principles and have very similar data and fields in their blocks. The Bitcoin block is an excellent place to start studying block architecture. Other Proof of Work blockchains like Dogecoin will use almost the same block structure (basically, Bitcoin is Doge’s grandfather).
You can also check this block or any other block by yourself by visiting one of the many block explorers available online.
Whats’s the meaning behind all the fields in a Bitcoin block structure?
Block height: Also known as block number, it’s basically the block in the blockchain chain until this block, meaning that there were 663852 blocks mined until this block. In Bitcoin, approximately 144 new Bitcoin blocks are mined every day.
Block size: well, the block size is the block size. In this case, the block is around 1.34 MB, and it includes the block header and the transaction information. Each block has a size limit — for example, 1MB, 1.3MB or 8MB depending on the…
