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I understand that a miner has a list of bitcoin transactions since the last time a a block was discovered. The first entry is the reward for who discovered the previous block. As more transactions gets added, they're appended to this list. This part is speculation, but I think there's also a nonce that the miners inject in order to produce a hash output that meets the difficulty.

Where can I find out the specifics about what exactly is hashed? I'm looking to understand the exact bytes and structure.

morsecoder
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Corey Ogburn
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  • possible duplicate of [What are bitcoin miners really solving?](http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/8031/5406) – Murch Nov 07 '15 at 11:54
  • The first entry is _not_ the reward for who discovered the previous block. The first transaction is unique to each miner and causes the block reward of the *upcoming* block to be spend to the miner that discovers the block. – Murch Nov 07 '15 at 11:57

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The data that's hashed is the block header. You can find a description of the format and layout at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_hashing_algorithm

Nate Eldredge
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  • How does a Generation block differ? What goes in the `hashPrevBlock` section of the generation block? All zeros? – Corey Ogburn Sep 29 '15 at 18:44
  • @CoreyOgburn: Do you mean the [genesis block](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block), the very first block in the block chain? Yes, the `hashPrevBlock` field is set to zero. Everything else is the same. – Nate Eldredge Sep 29 '15 at 18:48