A node has three major components:
* **Mining** (pool software and ASIC miners) – This component delivers the Proof-of-work for the node. It runs independently and takes the candidate block header (a temporary block that a miner has to mine to gain rewards) as input. The process is described in detail in the next section. The pool software is a sharding mechanism to distribute the hash calculation process to many machines doing the computation, known as proof-of-work.
* **Node software** – this component performs the transaction validation, block preparation and verification, and the bulk of the core processing to create the candidate block to be added to the blockchain.
* **The Bitcoin Server Network (BSN)** – this enables message exchanges between all nodes in the network. The BSN is also sometimes called the Bitcoin P2P Network.
{% hint style="info" %}
This decoupled view of three components of the node software is only one abstraction. It is possible to build node software with different component setups; for example, the node software component itself can be broken into many sub-components. Sometimes the node software can represent both BSN and the node software. The above separation is shown only to demonstrate different aspects which work independently
{% endhint %}
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