bitcoin/bitcoin.org — pull request #638 by harding (2014-11-08 04:08:03+00:00)
Title: Dev Docs: Describe Serialized Block Header And Block Format

Preview: http://dg0.dtrt.org/en/developer-reference#block-chain

* Replace current description of the block header with a better description.

* Describe the various version numbers.

* Describe how the merkle root is constructed.

* Describe how nBits is parsed and how to correctly create it to avoid negative values. See also my discussion with @minium on https://github.com/minium/Bitcoin-Spec/issues/3

* Describe the serialized block format used to calculate max block size.

Similar to pull #631, this is background documentation about the consensus-covered stuff for the upcoming non-consensus P2P reference section. Specificially, the goal here is to document the header format used in the P2P `headers` message and the serialized block format used in the P2P `blocks` message.