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July 29, 2017, 06:53:51 PM |
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Different block versions are present in both testnet and mainnet. It is used for signaling to activate soft forks. The first block version is version 1. Previous soft forks used a system called IsSuperMajority (ISM). These used fixed version numbers, consuming numbers 2, 3, and 4. We now use a new soft fork mechanism called BIP 9 Versionbits. BIP 9 specifies that all version numbers must have the top 3 bits of the version number be 001, which results in a version number of 0x20000000. From there, other bits are set for various soft forks, and unset once the fork has activated. For example, segwit uses bi 1, so setting bit 1 results in a version number of 0x20000002.
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