A grouping of transactions, marked with a timestamp, and a fingerprint of the previous block. The block header is hashed to produce a proof of work, thereby validating the transactions. Valid blocks are added to the main blockchain by network consensus.
blockchain::
The blockchain is an irreversible distributed database storing all Bitcoin transactions.
The irreversibility comes from the fact that each group of transactions, referred to as a block, is validated by solving a proof of work riddle and including the hash of the previous block.
Thus, the data can only be changed by an entity providing more than 51% of the computational power of the Bitcoin network.
Blocks currently have a size limit of 4 Million weight units.
New blocks have a statistical probability of being produced every ten minutes.
The blockchain is a distributed log of all Bitcoin transactions.
Transactions are grouped in discrete updates called blocks limited to up to 4 million weight units.
Blocks are produced approximately every ten minutes via a stochastic process called mining.
Each block includes a computationally intensive "proof of work".
The proof of work requirement is used to regulate the block intervals and protect the blockchain against attacks to rewrite history:
an attacker would need to outdo existing proof of work to replace already published blocks, making each block probabilistically immutable as it is buried under subsequent blocks.
BOLT::
BOLT, or Basis Of Lightning Technology, is the formal specification of the Lightning Network protocol. Unlike Bitcoin, which has a reference implementation that also serves as the protocol's specification, the various Lightning Network implementations follow BOLT so they can work with one another to form the same network. It is available at https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc.
Murch
3 years ago