Okay, I've been able to get a little further with this now. I found an example that had the coin base hash. Still missing this: coinbase = coinbase1 + extranonce1 + extranonce2 + coinbase2
However this SHOULD be one of the easiest parts to deal with. If I had the pieces to make coinbase, I could hash it twice and I'd get the double hash of coinbase. But I'm pretty close now, because the example I now found misses these pieces, but DOES include the double hash of coinbase.
I was able to use that to calculate the correct Merkle Root. So even though I STILL haven't managed to find a complete worked example end-to-end, the only missing link is extremely trivial - just concatenating four things and double hashing them.
Therefore, I'm assuming that my captured mining traffic will now work and generate a reasonable hash. Although it's not over yet, its pretty close.
I found so much misleading information. One source claimed that regardless of what kind of BTC operation it is (transmitting funds, or submitting shares) that you have to hash pairs linearly, not in a tree. Another source insisted that the concatenation of pieces from the merkle branches had to be paired in lexographic order, not in the order they appeared. Finally, an (apparently) correct source indicated NOT to lexographically order, but to build a binary tree hash the nodes as pairwise leaves moving them up a level after each completion until only the hashed root remains. THAT strategy allowed me to reproduce the example's final value from the coinbase and merkel branches.
I even tried using ChatGPT, but he kept changing his mind about which of the three strategies to use to hash the merkel tree. I can't believe there doesn't seem to be a complete, proper, end-to-end example out there on the net, and what's more surprising is all the posted code I've found which clearly uses completely different strategies to do the hashing. Every posting claims to be tested and correct and for BTC mining, but each one gives a different final hash for the same inputs.
-gt-