Blocks

A block records some or all of the most recent transactions that have not yet entered any prior blocks. Thus, a block is like a page of a ledger or record book.

Computation

What does a block contain:

• hash – Hash of the current block – 32 byte

• PoW - Proof of Work - 32 byte

• Prev_hash - Previous Block hash - 32 byte

• txes - the contained transactions - N * 32 byte (N is the count of txes)

• Timestamp - the timestamp of the block - 64bit unsigned integer

• Sig - the signature of the block - 16384 byte

You can create a new Block by passing in the prev_hash to the constructor. This will create a Block with empty hash, pow, txes and sig fields, the timestamp is set to the current timestamp.

• add_tx(hash) - adds the transaction hash to the block

• block_to_blob() - serializes the block, returns a Vec‹u8›

• block_from_vec(Vec) - Deserialize the block, and returns it

• hash() - Returns the computed hash for the block

• close_block(keypair, pow) – closes the block, signs it, and returns the hash for the block

The hash is an SHA3-256 cryptographic hash, which is calculated when close_block is called.