High-Level Architecture

A high level overview of node software components

Node High-Level System Architecture

A node has three major components:

• Mining (pool software and ASIC miners) – This component delivers the Proof-of-work for the node. It runs independently and takes the candidate block header (a temporary block that a miner has to mine to gain rewards) as input. The process is described in detail in the next section. The pool software is a sharding mechanism to distribute the hash calculation process to many machines doing the computation, known as proof-of-work.

• Node software – this component performs the transaction validation, block preparation and verification, and the bulk of the core processing to create the candidate block to be added to the blockchain.

• The Bitcoin Server Network (BSN) – this enables message exchanges between all nodes in the network. The BSN is also sometimes called the Bitcoin P2P Network.

This decoupled view of three components of the node software is only one abstraction. It is possible to build node software with different component setups; for example, the node software component itself can be broken into many sub-components. Sometimes the node software can represent both BSN and the node software. The above separation is shown only to demonstrate different aspects which work independently