Update to Nov 18 Post about Parsing a Bitcoin Block

After parsing blk*.dat data files that were downloaded from running Bitcoin Core and comparing the JSON output to a block explorer like https://www.blockchain.com/explorer, I saw that the data on the blockchain explorer was not in the native transaction data parsed from blk*.dat files. According to the book Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, "Behind the scenes, an actual transaction looks very different from a transaction provided by a typical block explorer. In fact, most of the high-level constructs we see in the various bitcoin application user interfaces do not actually exist in the bitcoin system." If you were to use the bitcoin-cli getrawtransaction and decoderawtransaction, you will see this to be true. The book further states, "In bitcoin, there are no coins, no senders, no recipients, no balances, no accounts and no addresses. All those things are constructed at a higher level for the benefit of the user, to make things easer to understand." Intriguing...