Published on: 2014-09-20T16:24:16+00:00
On September 20, 2014, Peter Grigor raised a question regarding the similarity between the Merkle root and the coinbase transaction ID from block 0 to block 72499 in Bitcoin. This similarity is due to the functioning of the merkle tree algorithm. In this algorithm, all the transaction IDs (txids) are added to a vector called vMerkleTree. However, during the early blocks, there was only one transaction known as the coinbase transaction and no other transactions. As a result, the for loop in the algorithm never executes because the size of vtx (the vector containing transactions) is always equal to 1.In a discussion on the Bitcoin-development mailing list, Peter Grigor explains that only specific transactions in the Bitcoin blockchain have associated Coinbase transactions and nothing else. When a tree has only one item, the merkle root is simply the hash of that item. Unfortunately, the context does not provide any additional information regarding this topic.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T10:19:18.404064+00:00