Hey guys! Brock here.
I attended today’s technical meetup and Tanner was there to explain to us what a bitcoin transaction was.
You may say: I already know what a transaction is.
I kind of said that too. But if you think about Bitcoin (the currency) – there is actually a lot going on behind the scenes. Up front you see the user interface where you enter another user’s public wallet address and then you put in an amount and then you hit send and you wait for a confirmation. The actual process of what happens on the backend is a bit more complicated than that.
I will try not to go into all the details on it – as I may end up putting some of you to sleep. If you really want to read up on it, go here.
I’m going to go through some of the highlights.
One of the things that was explained is that there really is a bitcoin smart contract.
“Wait… what?”
You heard me. I’m not talking ETH. I’m talking bitcoin still.
There is a smart contract in bitcoin and it looks something like this:
Tanner did a great job going into this. It is basically a small program that the Full Node runs just to verify that a transaction is valid. This happens before the tx is broadcasted to the Bitcoin Network.
Another item that was discussed was how Unspent Transactions (UTXOs) are used to validate who owns what and how they are identified in a transaction to transfer ownership as one user sends bitcoin to another user.
Part of that was shown in this diagram:
There was over an hour and a half of information. You can see the cliff notes here.
If you are on Facebook, you can watch some of the presentation here.
You are welcome to post comments here if you have any questions. Anyways, our next meeting is the Main August Meetup and we will have Drew presenting on living abroad in different countries and what is happening in Puerto Rico right now. (Lots of crypto stuff!) Very exciting stuff.
Thanks for stopping by and talk with you soon!
Brock