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Notes on data structures

These are just my personal notes trying to understand the Monero protocol and related data structures. Based on reading the daemon documentation, StackExchange posts, and running the RPC protocol and looking at what it gives. Reding the code would likely be needed for the final details but I don't have the resources to go there now. Also, maybe I don't need all the details, so let me know if you have any updates :) (pull req or other)

Block Structure

Main RPC call: get_block

  • Height: height of the blockchain at which this block appears
  • Block size: block size in bytes
  • Block weight: weighted block size. somehow different from raw block size, weighted by different factors. affects block fees, etc. still a bit unclear to me how this works in Monero vs other, but that seems to be the general idea.
  • Cumulative difficulty: Cumulative difficulty of all blocks in the blockchain. I think it just sums up all difficulties of all blocks. Which sounds too much, but if you look the numbers up, they are huge.
  • Cumulative difficulty top 64: Some kind of smaller summary of cumulative difficulty. Either 64 top blocks, or top bits, is what I think...
  • Difficulty: Block difficulty (non-cumulative)
  • Difficulty top 64: Same as "Cumulative difficulty top 64" but for block level (non-cumulative).
  • Hash: Block hash
  • Long term weight: Seems to be [block weight](long_term_block_weight the long term block weight of the block (transactions and all)), assuming some kind of sum of "block weight" over time. Some Monero Labs notes at least discuss using it as part of network fees. Whatever that means..
  • Miner transaction hash: The hash for the coinbase transaction in the block, paying the miner. I just noticed I asked about it on Stack Exchange before..
  • Major version: Major version of Monero protocol at this block height. Defines block header parsing rules.
  • Minor version: Minor version of Monero protocol at this block height. Defines interpretation details, not related to header parsing.
  • Nonce: The random value used to find the hash for this block.
  • Number of transactions (num_txs): Number of transactions in the block, excluding the coinbase transaction.
  • Previous hash (prev_hash): Hash for the previous block in the chain.
  • Reward: Number of atomic units assigned to the miner in this block.
  • Timestamp: The unix time at which the block was recorded into the blockchain. I guess it is epoch.. in seconds.
  • Wide Difficulty: Hard to find what this means, except this one Monero commit which is described as changing difficulty to 128 bit instead of 64 bit. So I guess this wide difficulty is just reference to 128 bits. Maybe top64 is also bit reference..?
  • Wide Cumulative Difficulty: Its just the cumulative version..
  • Credits: ??? Always appears to be 0, cannot find any reference to what this is.
  • Status: OK or error code (RPC).
  • Top hash: Again, this seems empty. But I guess it would be a reference to the hash of the block on top of the chain. Because there is something called "top_block_hash" in the Daemon get_info() docs.
  • Untrusted: Being untrusted (=this value is true) means the node has not been fully synced from scratch but rather bootstrapper from some other source. Like a checkpoint dump I guess.