Bitesize Bitcoin

Block Creation

Mining is still in the infrastructure-building phase, that’s hard to believe 13 + years after the genesis block was created, but yes, we’re still building out the foundations of the Bitcoin network, at least as far as mining is concerned. We know this because the incentive to mine is clearly dominated by the coinbase reward. Driven by new coin generation, miners pay less attention to the fees generated by the transactions included within the block than they do the block subsidy. Comb through past blocks though and you’ll see some spikes in Tx Fees vs Block subsidy, sometimes quite impressive. For instance, on December 21, 2017 it was a banner day for transactions. In block 500,439, …13 or so Bitcoin were paid for the 2,335 transactions in that block, fees made up 51% of the total payout to miners.  All in all, block subsidy is king, but fee are on the rise due to recent, uh, developments. 

Well this could be a fine time to brush up on the particulars of block creation and the handling of transactions. Now to the exiting stuff 

In this episode of Bitesize Bitcoin, we will cover the creation of a block template, a candidate block, and the components of a completed block

Don’t forget, commit to memory: The candidate block header fields are version number, previous block hash, the merkle root of proposed transactions, timestamp, target for Proof of Work, and a nonce.