In this Chaincode Decoded segment we talk about the fundamental role of Bitcoin's blockchain and some of its peculiarities.

We discuss:

• Purpose of the blockchain (0:40)

• Mining is a lottery, not a race (1:57)

• Why doesn't the same miner always win? (5:12)

• What happens if two blocks are found at the same height? (6:12)

• The longest reorgs (9:11)

• How does the blockchain work? (12:18)

• Headers-first synchronization and Ultraprune: Episode 1 with Pieter Wuille

• Episode 5: The UTXO set

• Why does Bitcoin converge on one chain? (15:20)

• Selfish mining paper: Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable

• Will we always find a new block? (18:04)

• Entropy sources in the block header

• Mining pools have disjoint hashing spaces (19:30)

• Correction: mining pools do not have a separate pay-out address for each participant, but give out a unique coinbase transaction stub for each.

• Eschaton block

Thanks to Caralie for the sound engineering.