It’s been a busy week for cryptocurrency developer Unwriter – hopefully he decided to take a well-deserved break this weekend. After bringing to the Bitcoin SV (BSV) community Genesis, Babel and Chronos, he has now introduced his fourth project of the new year, Meta. In his Medium post, Unwriter described the latest creation as a “BitDB for Bitcoin Block Metadata.”
Meta was created to allow for the implementation of queries of block metadata. The developer adds that it “completely deviates away” from the object schema for BitDB transactions, but that it still allows Bitqueries as do all other BitDBs.
Unwriter explains, “Meta is the first BitDB to crawl all the way from the Genesis block, which means you can query the entirety of the blockchain’s metadata set, instead of from a certain block height (Currently the Genesis and Babel nodes start crawling from height 525470, and the Chronos node doesn’t even have this concept, it has a 24 hour sliding window policy of ephemerality)”
Meta is able to search all the way back from the first Genesis Block. It doesn’t include any transactions – only block metadata – and is a database of all block metadata. To query the transactions, users can use Genesis, Babel or Chronos.
The latest node was created to be lean. It only stores the block metadata and the entire database is only approximately 1.2GB, making it possible to be included in the memory of any computer. Meta adds a couple new attributes, as did Chronos, including “chainworkdecimal” and “timeago.” The latter is calculated based on the “time” attribute and the former is calculated at runtime from the “chainwork” attribute. Chainwork stores its data in hexadecimal format, and chainworkdecimal converts its output to decimal format.
Unwriter explains, “Meta is a new type of BitDB that gives you access to Bitcoin’s block metadata. For the first time, the schema is completely different from other BitDB nodes because Meta crawls the block metadata instead of transactions. However you can still ‘magically’ use the same Bitquery used in all other BitDBs (Genesis, Babel, Chronos) to interact with Meta.”
Meta can be used in conjunction with the other available BitDBs in order to build powerful applications. It is one of a growing number of tools that make the BSV blockchain more useful in a variety of functions and is helping the network receive the notoriety it deserves.
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