73
votes
Accepted
Is there a limit for transaction size?
Wow this is such an interesting question! TL;DR: the transaction size limit, at the time of writing, is about 780kB (about 3 million gas). But read on.
There is no direct or fixed limit neither for ...
- 31.3k
57
votes
Accepted
Why is the average block time 17 seconds?
Due to advances in blockchain research, it was shown that significantly lower block times were possible and perhaps beneficial given the current connectivity of the internet. One of the potential ...
- 9,080
39
votes
How to delete or reset the blockchain in geth? (OSX)
You can also use geth removedb to remove the blockchain and state databases.
geth removedb
Remove local database? [y/N]
After removing the old databases, run geth --fast --cache=1024 (see answer to ...
- 391
35
votes
Accepted
Is it possible to cancel a transaction?
It can't be canceled, but it can be "out-gassed". You can grab the nonce (can be found on the pending tx on etherscan) and send another transaction with a higher gas price with the same nonce. If you ...
- 10.6k
32
votes
Accepted
What are Ethereum transaction receipts and what are they used for?
Relationship between Transaction Trie and Receipts Trie provides a good summary:
Transaction Receipts record the transaction outcome
Here is the Structure of a transaction receipt
blockHash: ...
eth♦
- 78k
31
votes
Accepted
How to delete or reset the blockchain in geth? (OSX)
For geth, delete $home/Libary/Ethereum/chaindata. That should wipe out the blockchain itself and let you sync from scratch. Also you probably want to do a fast sync afterwards to get back fast-ish on ...
- 9,946
22
votes
How to delete or reset the blockchain in geth? (OSX)
For other operating systems, the default datadir is:
Mac: ~/Library/Ethereum
Linux: ~/.ethereum
Windows: %APPDATA%/Ethereum
Delete the chaindata subdirectory that you find.
Run geth --fast --cache=...
eth♦
- 78k
20
votes
Accepted
Are gas limit in transaction and block gas limit different?
Yes. Each transaction has a gas limit. For example, there could be 5 unmined transactions where each has a gas limit of 10, 20, 30, 40, 50. The block gas limit determines how many transactions can ...
eth♦
- 78k
19
votes
Storing document/file in blockchain
The 1 MB size limit per Block is for the Bitcoin's blockchain. In Ethereum, there is theoretically no limit for the block size. However, blockchain is not meant for data storage and storing large ...
- 3,795
19
votes
Accepted
Why does ethereum creates a new block,without even a single transaction?
A benefit of a blockchain is that it is append-only with, in practice, immutable past blocks.
These past blocks are immutable because it is very difficult (via proof-of-work) to create a competing ...
- 6,981
18
votes
Accepted
What happens when a smart contract gets several similar calls in the same block?
What happens if Bob, Alice and Eve all call the Greeter at the same time and all three calls are in the same block?
The three transactions would get called, not necessarily in sequence, and the last ...
- 38.9k
17
votes
Is there a limit for transaction size?
As of 12/08/2017, the gas limit as detailed on EthStats.net is 6,700,314.
The gas limit was 'stuck' at 4.7 million. It was recommended that miners change their settings such that the gas limit could ...
- 4,135
17
votes
Accepted
What is the default ordering of transactions during mining?
Edit: 23 June 2017 - Added Parity details (see below)
Geth
For the vanilla Geth implementation, the commitNewWork() function in worker.go orders in the following way:
//approach 2
transactions := ...
- 35.3k
14
votes
Accepted
Relationship between Transaction Trie and Receipts Trie
Transaction Tries and Transaction Receipt Tries are indeed independent data structures with distinct roots stored on the blockchain header and differ in both purpose and content.
Purpose:
...
- 4,990
14
votes
Accepted
Why are there no leading zeroes in ethereum block hash?
In the Ethereum blockchain, the difficulty is used to calculate a target.
Here are the ethminer logs for block number 1257006 :
ℹ 35:02:42.89 ethminer Solution found; Submitting to http://192.168....
- 38.9k
14
votes
Is it possible to cancel a transaction?
While it's not possible to explicitly cancel a transaction, you can invalidate the transaction before it's mined. The way this works is by broadcasting the same transaction using the same nonce, but ...
- 4,625
12
votes
Accepted
How can I get the data of the latest 10 blocks via web3.js?
There are a few issues with the accepted answer:
as @Lam-Le mentions, .getBlock() and .getBlockNumber() are both asynchronous so if a new block is created during the loop not only will you no longer ...
- 236
10
votes
What does it mean to "seal a block"?
"Seal a block" is a proposed term to describe "mine a block" in a private chain. Private chains typically do not need to use proof-of-work mining, so a different term can be helpful. Specifics of ...
eth♦
- 78k
10
votes
How can I get the data of the latest 10 blocks via web3.js?
Use web3.eth.getBlock with web3.eth.blockNumber
for (var i=0; i < 10; i++) {
console.log(web3.eth.getBlock(web3.eth.blockNumber - i));
}
EDIT: for web3.js 1.0+ the loop's body should be:
web3....
eth♦
- 78k
10
votes
Why does ethereum creates a new block,without even a single transaction?
On a public chain, it makes perfect sense to keep creating blocks, because a miner will still get the 5 ETH block reward, with or without transactions inside. Thus, geth will continuously mine as long ...
- 7,030
9
votes
How to parse blocks with Python?
I implemented a bitcoin blockchain parser after following along with this blog post. I havent tried changing it to work with the Ethereum blockchain but maybe it can give you some guidance. Here's a ...
- 215
9
votes
Why are there no leading zeroes in ethereum block hash?
What you see in block explorers is the sha3 of the block header, not the ethash.
- 91
9
votes
What is the default ordering of transactions during mining?
To add on the excellent answer by Richard Horrocks:
I studied the last 1000 blocks:
~85% of blocks seem to be ordered by High gas price first (respecting nonce order for a single sender address) (The ...
- 271
9
votes
Accepted
If all nodes execute smart contracts, why do only block creators get the gas fee?
However, only the miner earns the gas associated with the smart contract exectution. Does that mean that all nodes that execute the smart contract after the miner to verify its result do not earn any ...
- 16.3k
9
votes
When are “pending” transactions dropped from the blockchain?
All transactions are kept in the Mempool a term borrowed from Bitcoin. You can see all the current pending transactions here: Pending Transactions
There's a limit to the size of the Mempool and once ...
- 605
9
votes
Accepted
Why are there so many empty blocks?
In short: empty blocks propagate around the network more quickly than blocks that aren't empty.
If two mining nodes find the proof-of-work solution to the blocks they're mining at the same time, only ...
- 35.3k
9
votes
Accepted
Block time and confirmation time
Block time is the expected interval between two blocks. For ethereum, this is around 15 seconds. For Bitcoin, it is 10 minutes.
The number of confirmations is simply the number of blocks that have ...
- 3,790
8
votes
Accepted
How to use blockchain as a Database?
The best way to start is to understand the following few concepts and learnings.
what is Smart contracts ?
What is solidity and how to start writing your domain data or objects in solidity.
...
- 1,842
8
votes
Accepted
Difficulty and total difficulty
These are explained on the wiki in the JSON RPC README, under the entry for eth_getBlockByHash().
difficulty: QUANTITY - integer of the difficulty for this block.
totalDifficulty: QUANTITY - ...
- 35.3k
8
votes
Calculate approximative block height at a certain time?
If you just mean a general formula, rather than something written in Solidity...
Something along the lines of:
last_block_number + ((future_time - time_now) / block_time)
Where the future_time and ...
- 35.3k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible