Protocol & Consensus • Estimated 25m

Bitcoin Byte Order

protocol.byte-order

Bitcoin serializes many numeric fields in little-endian byte order while commonly displaying hashes and identifiers in reversed human-readable order. Keeping wire order separate from display order prevents parsing and transaction-construction errors.

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Curated resources (3)

• Bitcoin Developer Reference: Block Headers (article) Field-level reference showing little-endian header integers and the internal-versus-displayed hash byte-order convention.
• Bitcoin Wiki: Protocol Documentation (article) Wire-protocol reference for little-endian integers, hashes, and other common serialized structures.
• Programming Bitcoin (book) Hands-on context for serializing integers, hashes, transactions, and block data.

Direct prerequisites (1)

• Transaction Lifecycle

Direct dependents (0)

• None

Canonical site description: Interactive Bitcoin knowledge graph with prerequisites, curated resources, and structured topic pages.