BIP34, which is included in Zcash, encodes the block height into each
block by adding it into the unused BitcoinScript field of the block's
coinbase transaction. However, this is done just by requiring that the
script pushes the block height onto the stack when it executes, and
there are multiple different ways to push data onto the stack in
BitcoinScript. Also, the genesis block does not include the block
height, by accident.
Because we want to *parse* transactions into an algebraic data type that
encodes their structural properties, rather than allow possibly-invalid
data to float through the internals of our node, we want to extract the
block height upfront and store it separately from the rest of the
coinbase data, which is inert. So the serialization code now contains
just enough logic to parse BitcoinScript-encoded block heights, and
special-case the encoding of the genesis block.
Elsewhere in the source code, the `LockTime` struct requires that we
must use block heights less than 500,000,000 (above which the number is
interpreted as a unix timestamp, not a height). To unify invariants, we
ensure that the parsing logic works with block heights up to
500,000,000, even though these are unlikely to ever be used for Zcash.
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