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Title: Is there any general explanation of this? Post by: samedhi on February 27, 2011, 12:25:59 AM Other than the source code, I have not been able to find any mention of how exactly bitcoin generates a sha256 hash? It seems like some simple "How things work" documentation might really help with adoption and understanding? I do know that it is written in the source, but I am awful at reading C++ code?
For instance, I am not even sure exactly what is being hashed? Is it the concatenation of the last winning hash message and a randomly generated message? What are the lengths of each of these messages (I would assume 256)? Is it like this: sha256(<256 bit original message> + <256 bit generated message)) ? Then check if it has the correct number of leading zero's? Thank you. Title: Re: Is there any general explanation of this? Post by: Gavin Andresen on February 27, 2011, 12:29:40 AM See:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_hashing_algorithm The exact hash done is double-sha256: sha256(sha256(block_header_data)) See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2 ... for information about sha256 |