What is a Bitcoin block?

A Bitcoin block contains a set of data that holds all the information necessary to verify transaction and link the block back to its previous block in the chain.

The constituent parts of a block can be seen in the table below.

The block size is simply the size of the block in bytes – this varies mainly depending on the number of transactions.

The block data is shown in the table below:

 

 

The block header is the list of meta-data about the block – a full explanation can be seen in our guide – What is a block header in Bitcoin? – the block header is an 80 byte field. The next pieces of information are the number of transactions in the block and the transactions themselves.

A transaction is usually above 250 bytes depending on its type – multisignature transactions use a lot more space due to the required conditions on spending – you can see more about the different transaction types here. The average block contains about 500 transactions – which equates to just less than one transaction per second.

Related guides

Bitcoin Transactions - Pay-to-Public-Key? Bitcoin Transactions – Multi Signature Transactions? Bitcoin Transactions – Pay-to-Script-Hash? What is a Bitcoin Fork? How does a hashing algorithm work? Bitcoin Transactions – Scriptsig and Scriptpubkey – locking and unlocking a transaction? How does the Bitcoin Network actually work?

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