Where can I find a description (preferably a diagram like below) showing the block structure in an Ethereum blockchain?
Credits: Wikipedia
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Sign up to join this communityWhere can I find a description (preferably a diagram like below) showing the block structure in an Ethereum blockchain?
Credits: Wikipedia
Lets first start with my adaptation of this figure illustrating the Bitcoin block structure:
So far so good. All fairly basic.
Enter Ethereum and things get a wee bit more complex. After reading through this and this, and as per @eth 's recommendation this, my best interpretation is the figure below:
The header field definitions are available in section 4.3 of the yellow paper.
Here is a complete structure of a block and where it plays its role in Ethereum's blockchain.
You asked for a diagram but i think this would be more explanatory.
The description can be found in the Yellow Paper which is the formal specification of the Ethereum protocol.
Here are the main pieces of a block:
4.3. The Block. The block in Ethereum is the collection of relevant pieces of information (known as the block header), H, together with information corresponding to the comprised transactions, T, and a set of other block headers U that are known to have a parent equal to the present block’s parent’s parent.
No diagram though (an opportunity for the community).
Here's a picture from V's article regarding data structures for light clients:
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/02/18/ethereum-scalability-and-decentralization-updates/
Vitalik Buterin gives a compact answer:
Every block header in Ethereum contains 3 trees for three kinds of objects: Transactions, Receipts (essentially, pieces of data showing the effect of each transaction), State.
You can read a longer version with pictures here.
Extrapolating from the syntactic block structure, we can also ask what the semantic ethereum world state structure looks like. I use this diagram to explain the relationship between "on-chain", "off-chain", and everything in between, including L2 scaling solutions. Please see my accompanying blog post for more details.