Nicholas Bohm to Satoshi: "**** blocks in network chain" (February 13, 2009)

It’s the total number of blocks in the block chain, meaning the network’s block chain, which everyone has a copy of. Every Bitcoin node displays the same number and it goes up about every 10 minutes whenever someone generates a block. When you haven’t had it running for a while, once you’re connected it spins up rapidly as it downloads what was generated while you were gone to catch up. I’m not sure exactly how to describe it (that would fit on the status bar in 1 word, maybe 2 words max), any ideas?

In one or two words I can’t think how to do it, I admit. Must it be that short? There seems to be a fair asmount of room in the status bar (especially if the window is sized so that the descriptive text for payment and receipt transactions isn’t truncated). How to say it best probably depends on the (future) user guide and FAQs, as it needs to link in sensibly with what they say. It sounds as though it should say ”**** blocks in network chain”.

The blocks number in the status column next to your transactions is the number of blocks that have come after that transaction. Your transaction is essentially “in” that many blocks.

I follow that.

Thanks,

Nicholas

Satoshi

NBQuote from: Nicholas Bohm on February 12, 2009, 5:52:00 PM UTC

The bottom of the UI shows:

Generating      4 connections    4024 blocks    164 transactions

I understand “generating”; I assume I am connected to 4 other nodes; and I know I have recorded 164 transactions (including failed generation attempts). I’m not clear what the “blocks” figure describes. It’s much smaller than the total of all the blocks shown against all my transactions.

Regards,

Nicholas