In this article we will see what happens from when we send a bitcoin to when it is received from another address.
There are 3 main parts within a transaction, and these are:
Signing
Broadcasting
Confirming
Let’s start from the first one, the signing.
Now, by pressing the send button we are telling the wallet to send the selected bitcoin sum to the address indicated in the space provided.
The wallet then creates a transaction, which is actually a message containing the data of who sends, who receives and how much is sent.
Once this is done, a unique digital signatures is created by mathematically mixing my private key, that is the private key of the sender.
The private key as we know, is a long series of letters and numbers that acts as a password for your bitcoins.
Whoever knows the private key has control of these bitcoins, so you must protect it in every way.
The digital signatures is proof that I have this private key along with my public key.
Remember that each transaction creates a different digital signatures.
After signing the transaction, the system creates a file containing the digital signatures and the transaction message.
This concludes the first step on signing.
In the second step, the broadcasting, the wallet sends the file to the computers that mine the blockchain or have a copy of it.
These computers are known as NODES and each node that receives the file checks it to understand that it is legitimate and correct.
In particular, check that who is sending some coin needs have the funds in his wallet and then confirm the validity of the digital signatures.
Once confirmed as valid, this file is sent to other nodes which repeat the verification process.
When a node receives the file, it keeps it in an area called Mempool or memory pool.
This is a space dedicated to valid but not yet confirmed transactions.
Now let’s move on to the status of our transaction, Block explorer is software or a tool on a website to check the status of transactions and navigate the blockchain.
We can check the holdings of all bitcoin addresses, check all transactions and have statistics and information on the network in real time.
If we check our transaction right now, we will see it marked as unconfirmed. this means that our transaction is not yet part of the blockchain.
It is defined as zero confirmation transaction.
In this state the transaction could still be canceled or postponed and we have no guarantees that it will be included in the blockchain.
If you sell products and services, never accept an unconfirmed transaction as proof of payment.
If you remember, when we talked about mining, we said that miners group transactions to create a block of the blockchain and of course miners will take the transactions that will be more profitable, there is a limit to the number of transactions.
So the miners compete with each other to create the blockchain block and this competition is based on mathematical calculations.
The greater the computational power the greater the chances of victory.
When a miner wins the competition, all transactions that are in that block are considered confirmed.
Miners write the history of bitcoin transactions and a block is created every 10 minutes.
When we go back to check our transaction, if it is written inside a block, it will be marked as with 1 confirmation.
Confirmations will grow as block creation increases.
The transaction will be fully confirmed with 6 confirmations and without any possibility of cancellation.
The transaction will now be received and it will unmodifiable.