February 2018
Intermediate to advanced
288 pages
6h 58m
English
Content preview from Ethereum Smart Contract Development
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Inside a block
Let's now discuss the contents of a block of bitcoin blockchain. This will help us in understanding and comparing Ethereum, which we will take up in Chapter 2, Grokking Ethereum. A block is a very interesting concept, because a block gives blockchain its properties. It is the basic element of a blockchain.
Therefore, it is important to know what a block consists of. Figure 1.8 lists the basic parts of a bitcoin block. First of all, we have a magic number, also called bitcoin network ID.
Figure 1.8: Parts of a bitcoin block (Bitcoin wiki)
It is four bytes long and is an arbitrary number that signals that this is a bitcoin block. ...