What is Block?
A batch of transactions accepted into the ledger together, produced roughly every ten minutes and limited to about four million weight units.
Each block carries a header (version, previous block hash, a commitment to its transactions, a timestamp, the difficulty target and a nonce) and the transactions themselves. Miners assemble candidates and search for a header hash below the target.
Block space is deliberately scarce. That scarcity is what creates a fee market: users bid for inclusion, and the bidding is what will eventually replace the block subsidy as miner revenue.
Related terms
Blockchain
The append-only chain of blocks that records every Bitcoin transaction, where each block commits to the one…
How it worksBlock height
The number of blocks in the chain before the current one, counting the genesis block as zero. It is the…
Transactions & feesMempool
The set of valid transactions a node has seen but that are not yet in a block — the queue competing for block…
Transactions & feesFee rate (sat/vB)
What a transaction pays per virtual byte of the space it occupies. Miners prioritise by fee rate, not by…
This definition is part of the Bitcoin Logical glossary. For the fuller explanation, start with Learn, or see the live numbers on The Bitcoin Signal.