Topic: How can you verify if a bitcoin is real? - page 8. (Read 1122 times)

You're going to want to understand how Block chain works, before you get into the Crypto Currency part.
Once you have an understanding of the Blockchain, everything else comes easy

Wish you all the best in your Crypto Journey!
And please.. Don't be another moron who goes and sells his kidney and sells his kid on the black market so he can buy into this thing.
Crypto Currency is going nowhere for a long time. It will still be here after you have a vast understanding and a bunch of cash you don't mind potentially losing.

You can't make a fake Bitcoin and even you can create fake transaction, network will definitely reject it, and you can't create new Bitcoin without having 51% of Bitcoin mining hashing power. So if you receive Bitcoins in your Bitcoin wallet it is surely an authentic one, or if you are still not satisfied, you can copy the transaction ID of your transaction and paste it on block explorer, if you can see that your Bitcoin is recorded there or the transaction status is confirmed then it is real. It is impossible for anyone to transfer Bitcoin without blockchain because all transactions are recorded in blockchain, unless you give the ownership (private key) of your Bitcoin wallet to other people, that's the only possible way to transfer Bitcoin without creating a transaction.

Bitcoins are not stored as balances, but rather as the sum of incoming and outcoming transactions.

A transaction is basically a signed message that says: "Alice sends Bob 1 BTC". What miners and nodes do is, they 1) verify whether the message has been signed by Alice and not and impostor and 2) they verify whether Alice actually has the funds (read: a sufficient amount of BTC in incoming transactions) to send Bob 1 BTC. If both is true, Bob himself now has a sufficient amount of BTC in incoming transactions to send 1 BTC.

Basically, you can verify whether a bitcoin is "real" by following this chain of transactions upstream until you reach the block where the coins have been mined. Mined coins are issued in a special kind of transaction that requires no inputs. The integrity of this special issuance transaction and the block that enabled it, is given due to the blocks that are mined on top of it, ie. the blockchain.

Here's a more detailed, technical information on transactions as transactions are actually little scripts and not just simple messages:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction

Wallet and blockchain explorers such as blockchain.info interpret this ledger of transactions (ie. the blockchain) for you so that you don't have to follow each transaction back to its source yourself.

I see a lot of confusion there, but that is perfectly normal since you are new in this area apparently. First, and like some users pointed out, there is no bitcoin without blockchain. You must understand that we have the blockchain technology, that basically is just a record of blocks that are linked and secured by cryptography. The blockchain technology is what guarantees that whatever information you receive using that technology is real. This is what miners do, they make sure the blocks (records of transactions made between users) are valid/real before they are added to the blockchain.

Now bitcoin, is just a protocol, or a "set of rules", that runs on the blockchain. So you don't need to do anything to make sure that the bitcoin you have is real, because it's held on the blockchain, and is that technology that makes sure that the bitcoin transaction you just received is real (that tx is on a block that is added to the blockchain, and all that is verified by miners).

Enter your Bitcoin address (the one you were paid into) into a public blockchain browser such as https://blockchain.info/. That will show you the relevant entries in the global shared Bitcoin ledger, which confirms that you, as the holder of the private key for that address, are the owner of those funds.

Buy bitcoins from a reknown broker. Look up for some references around the broker. Depending on the country you might have differnent brokers.

<>

Complex is OK. I prefer to spend 100 days trying to understand than blindly accepting the things I don't.

I'm sorry but struggling to understand this point you made: <>

Could you ellborate?

You can't send bitcoins without a blockchain. It is not that simple. Depending on how far you want to research this, it can get quite complicated.

The point is that you don't encrypt anything with public key cryptography in Bitcoin, it is used only for signing instead. (encrypting the hash is a signature)
When you send bitcoins you sign a transaction which says which public key (address) will be able to send these coins in the future.
This transaction is then validated by the entire network and miner's add it into a block. If miner's add an invalid transaction into a block, their block will be considered invalid by the rest of the network and other miners will ignore their block as it never happened.

Hi All,

First post so please be gentle!. I'm trying to get familiar with crypto currency and understand 'how it works'. I've reached a block and I'm hoping someone can shed some light on a particular point.

I understand the process of using public and private keys, back from the time when Phil Zimmermann created PGP. PGP allowed a user to encrypt a file, eg: an email/file (technically, just a bunch of ones and zeros) so that when the other user decrypted the file, they would see the words/file again. Or, to phrase it another way, the encryption was just a 'wrapper' for the content - ie, the words in my email or the file I sent.

Now, if someone sent me a bitcoin, how would I know what I was looking at? With an encrypted email, once decrypted I would be able to see something (text/file) and realise that I had actually received something. But, if someone sent me a bitcoin, what would I be looking at when I decrypted with my private key? A file filled with ones and zeros? Or maybe a simple text file with words inside saying, "Hey, this is 1 bitcoin!"

Can someone shed some light on what it I actually receive when I purchase a bitcoin and how I can verify that what I have 'in my hands', is actually a bitcoin and not just a bunch of ones and zeros? I understand that the blockchain is supposed to verify what is what but, what if I wanted to pass my bitcoin directly to you without the blockchain. Again, how would I know, what I received - was a bitcoin?

Thank you for your time and patience with my lack of understanding!

Regards,

Staffs Lebowski..