Protocol & Consensus • Estimated 25m

CompactSize Encoding

protocol.compact-size-encoding

CompactSize is Bitcoin's variable-length integer encoding for counts and byte lengths in serialized protocol data. Understanding its prefixes is necessary for parsing transaction, block, script, and network messages correctly.

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Curated resources (3)

• Bitcoin Wiki: Protocol Documentation (article) Wire-protocol table for CompactSize prefixes, encoded widths, and integer ranges.
• Bitcoin Core Developer Documentation: Serialization (article) Reference context for CompactSize fields and canonical size encodings in transaction serialization.
• Programming Bitcoin (book) Hands-on treatment of parsing and serializing Bitcoin transaction data.

Direct prerequisites (1)

• Transaction Lifecycle

Direct dependents (0)

• None

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