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BTC - Block Version

Description

The Bitcoin Block Version shows the block header reported version for the first block in each timeframe. Recently, this field has been partially coopted by miners to increase miner efficiency at the expense of it immediately reporting a block version meaningful to the observer (BIP 320). Values beyond the actual block version of 4 are useful to see here to see the changing state of the blockchain over time.

We plan to further refine this metric in the future by treating the 16 bits referred to in BIP 320 as a new field.

Bitcoin's USD Market Price is included for reference.

Pseudocode

for each block in blockchain:
  (x,y) := (block.time, block.version)

for each hour in blockchain:
  hr_blk_version := first(blockchain[hr_start:hr_end].version)
  (x,y) := (hour, hr_blk_version)

for each day in blockchain:
  day_blk_version := first(blockchain[day_start:day_end].version)
  (x,y) := (day, day_blk_version)

Technical Info

The block version number indicates the validation rule set, with current valid values being 1-4.

Since March 2016, ASIC miners have been taking advantage of leniency in the consensus protocol to effectively turn part of the block header version field into an extra nonce field, allowing miners to bypass changing the coinbase tx nonce which would be more computationally expensive. This has been referred to as 'overt AsicBoost.' See external links below.

We are working on a variant of this metric to differentiate true version bits from nonce bits.

  • Hourly and daily aggregations are derived from block data using open for this metric.
  • Hourly data contains occasional gaps; no blocks were generated during these times.

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