Topic: I have a few questions with Bitcoin. Help please? (Read 241 times)

the blockchain would grind to a halt. no new blocks would be produced. no new bitcoins would be mined. no transactions would be confirmed.

this has happened before with dead altcoins. miners can come back online at any time and pick up where they left off, even years later, but until/unless that happens the blockchain just sits in stasis.

In that very remote scenario, with no miners solving blocks no Bitcoin production can happen because nothing is working on a block to be solved to earn the reward.... The rewards do not build up by themselves.

Well, I have one more question. Although it is unlikely to happen in practice, in theory if there is no online miner in the system within 10 minutes and there is no computer trying to solve the hash function for production (if all miners quit ) will BTC production still occur? what happens to the BTC produced? Do you have any guesses?

Your answers have been really helpful for me. I am glad you take the time to my questions. I may have some pronunciation mistakes because I am not as experienced with Bitcoin as you are, forgive me.

If we can find a way to do that without unlocking all the big 50BTC outputs at once, then this will be a good way to sustain mining as the block reward goes down.

The 6.25BTC block reward today is already more valuable than the 12.5BTC reward last year. But I think there's a limit to how high that can scale. I mean, the price can't just keep going up forever in the long term, right? It's got to stabilize at some point. Even Amazon.com's revenue is starting to stabilize as well.

I said not all at once because if we dump the 50BTC outputs at some point in the future and let people get it easily, it's going to cause a dangerous price dump considering 50BTC is with more than $1 million now. And who knows how much that's going to be worth in 40 years.

It's also going to discourage people from brute-forcing addresses as they can't succeed at finding a match on an average address within 50 years.

Maybe instead of going to a pool where miners can obtain them they go into some "locked" state controlled by the bitcoin network. The coins then trickle down a little bit to miners whenever the transaction fees are higher than normal, in an effort to keep the transaction fee at a stable level. And if the fee gets too low for miners then these coins can be switched off again and reduce flowing to them.

What do you mean by saying "questions"? If there is no bitcoin transactions, miners can continue mining just for the coinbase rewards.

Instead of transfer, consider using the word "transaction" which is commonly used here. It doesn't matter the amount of transactions one block has. It can have none, but still, it will reward the miner with the analogous bitcoins. (50 or 25 or 12.5 etc)

The mining fee is what bitcoin users pay once they broadcast their transaction. People that want to get their transactions confirmed fast, will pay a big fee. The 6.25 bitcoins is not a mining fee, it is a reward to the miner. These bitcoins are bornt from thin air. It's not strange, the miner proves that he can insert a block into the blockchain with his proof of work. This way, all other nodes can confirm that he mined it, so everyone continues on this tough competition.

UTXO stands for Unspent Transaction Output and it does exactly what @mikeywith wrote.
We tend to use TX instead of transaction

Yes it's not exactly 21,000,000. The last halving which will be the 33th one, will cut the rewards to 1 satoshi per block. The next one isn't considered a halving since it doesn't halves the reward. Rewards after 33th halving, no longer exist and that's because you can't spend/receive 0.5 satoshis. Whether it's 21M or 20,999M, it's the same thing. We don't have to explain anyone that it's not exactly 21M, there is simply no reason.

Actually total bitcoins that we will ever produce are BTC20,999,999.997899994.

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Welcome to bitcointalk!
As long as you stay here, you'll learn new things everyday. 

Both the block rewards and the transaction fees are independent entities, before the total 21M bitcoins are mined, blocks without transaction fees can happen, after the 21M production is over, blocks without block rewards can happen.


The miner receives a block reward (6.25 as of now but cuts in half every 4 years or so) regardless of the existence of transactions.



All the rewards (transaction fees + block reward) will go to the address that is in the coinbase transaction, this is all that the blockchain understands, as far as "group mining" it's called pool mining, miners get paid based on the amount of work they put, the number of trials (hashes) submitted by every miner determines their share of the total reward ( different pools pay in a different format, read about PPS vs PPLNS)


Only some (very a few if any) decentralized exchanges work on the bases of smart contracts (yes possible on BTC too) where the buying and selling do happen on the main chain, but that is a tiny bit of volume which could be ignored, so safe to say that the majority of volume happens outside of the main blockchain, if you buy BTC from an exchange you get your own BTC address but not your own wallet, just like your bank account number, it's unique just for you, but the money in it is essentially owned by the bank.

So in reality all of the exchange happens only on the database of the exchange, just like how things go when you transfer money from your bank account to your wife, the bank simply changes the balance sheet without moving anything.  



It's the name of the "packages" owned by x address, if you have two of 10$ bills your balance is $20 and you have 2 UTXO each is $10


In bitcoin, you can't send a portion of the UTXO, so if you have 1 UTXO of  1 bitcoin and you want to send 0.3 to your friend, you will need to send 0.3 to him and 0.7 to yourself (your own address), your own address can be the same one you sent from or a new one, there are no rules in the blockchain that state you must use a new address, but wallets do create a new address for you to receive the change of 0.7BTC just for privacy reasons, as well as more security, this is a long story but you should understand that BTC address isn't exactly a public key, but once you spend from it, the public key becomes available and thus it makes it slightly easier to know your private key, by slightly easier I mean instead of it being "very, very, very, very difficult" it becomes "very, very, very difficult", notice the 1 missing "very" from the second one, I had to make it clear enough that even after revealig your public key it isn't by anymeans easy to guess your private key, but once and if quantum computers become a thing, then re-using the same address will be a stupid idea, because "Elliptic curve cryptography is vulnerable to quantum"






All that matters is the size of the transaction, transactions with more UTXOs will have a larger size, also the address you send from whether it's a legacy or Segwit address makes a lot of difference, your wallet software will calculate the size in bytes and x that by the number of satoshis that everyone is currently playing, so if your transaction is 100 bytes in size, and you pay 1 satoshi you pay 100 satoshis, but every wallet calculates the "best" fees differently depending on their code and how it analyzes the mempool and current situation.

You should also know that a transaction with 100BTC may still pay less than that with 0.1BTC, it all depends on the total size of the transation and how much people are willing to pay, the miners will pick the once that pay the most per byte.


I believe there are some rounding rules that will handle this, I will dig into this and get back to you.

@NotFuzzyWarm  yes, a few hours ago, I saw that a block reward was given even though there was no transfer transaction in a block. For example;

https://www.blockchain.com/tr/btc/block/0000000000000000000a3cfbbe94027465251135d84c775a67a420881f703f0b

Yer 1st merit given for getting back to us. A lot of folks do not bother to do that.

Regarding question 1 it should be mentioned that a block does NOT have to contain transactions and several large pools routinely process intentionally empty blocks despite there being tx's available. As to why they do that is heavily discussed in other areas of the Forum such as here

I should add that Kano's pool has a lot of good information about various aspects of mining located in the Help area

@NotFuzzyWarm    Thank you for answering my questions so early and clearly. You really helped a lot. I would appreciate if you have any ideas for other questions.

@philipma1957 thank you for the answer. I also think that lost bitcoins can be recovered with a software like you. I have never looked at it the way you look at Bitcoin production. The probability of falling below 1 satoshi does not seem possible at the moment. I am sure that smaller units will emerge than satoshi in terms of bitcoin lifetime.

I am grateful to you for the information you provided, it was really helpful. I would love to hear if there are other ideas.  

To answer some points:
1)Transactions are stored in Mempool and it is extremely rare for there to be zero tx waiting to be processed. You can see mempool status here. Per Kano who runs a pool, in the past 2 years that has happened only once and it was empty for just a few seconds

2)The amount of BTC being transferred does not matter. The reward is for processing the block. If it contains 0.00001 or 1000 BTC in Tx's the mining reward is the same (currently 6.25 + fees)

3)Yes. Every block is found by just 1 physical piece of hardware. If the owner of that miner is solo mining the owner of said miner gets all the rewards + fees. In the case of the miner being part of a pool the rewards are divided amongst all folks participating in the pool. How much each miner in the pool receives is based on their size. eg if a miner has 1% of the pools total hash rate then they get 1% of the rewards.

4) "Will a wallet be created for me" -- NO! Creation of wallets and maintaining them is an entirely separate thing. Yes the exchange will generally allow you to create a wallet that is ran by the exchange but it is not automatic and you are free to use any wallet you own. Your wallet(s) may be web-based via an exchange, a hardware device such as the Ledger Nano, software based like Electrum or Core, etc.

Thass all for now, time for others to pipe in with other answers.

That whitepaper should answer many of your questions.  At least it should help you to properly define some terms that you are misusing.

Anyway there is also a podcast that helps explain Bitcoin as well and I recommend it.

https://media.grc.com/sn/sn-287-lq.mp3

Thank you for your answer. I read the article you mentioned, but besides the questions I asked, this article is a bit superficial.

Sounds like you  need to start with reading  Satoshi's white paper.  It can be found here in several languages.

https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-paper

Hello. I am doing a thesis on Bitcoin, but I did not actually have any action related to BTC other than buying and selling BTC on the stock exchange a few times. There are some technical points I am stuck with, I search for answers for hours every day, but I cannot find an answer. I would be very glad if the friends who know can help, thanks in advance.

1-)When there is no BTC transfer, is there no BTC production or will the BTC algorithm generate questions and continue BTC production?

2-)Even if there is only one transfer of 1 BTC in a block, does the miner who approves this transaction receive a mining fee of 6.25 times this transfer?

3-)When I went into detail on one of the blocks at https://www.blockchain.com/explorer, I saw that the mining fee of 6.25 and the fees that the transferers left as a commission to the miners were transferred to a single wallet with a "COINBASE (Newly Created Coins)" note at the end of the block. Are all tips and mining fees for a block transferred to a single miner? There are around 3,000 transfers in a block. Does a single miner approve all of them, so all fees are transferred to this person? If mining is done in groups, how is the earnings of a block distributed among miners?

4-)Are the buying and selling transactions made on crypto money exchanges in-chain transactions? Will a wallet be created for me if I buy BTC from the exchange? When I sell the BTC that I bought again, should it be added to the transfer confirmation, ie to the block? Or is there a representative purchase and sale in stock exchanges?

5-)Is UTXO the name of the BTC packages in the wallet or is it the name of the change returned from the transfers? Is a new address being created due to UTXO? If so, does the old address still remain available? What if there is money in it? Is it connected to the same wallet at two addresses?

6-)When calculating the mining fee, the byte calculations are complete, but are the size of the transfer, the age of the transaction and the number of inputs also important? Why can different bytes output for similar operations? How is this calculated if the age of the procedure is important? I saw a fee of 0.0001 BTC when a transfer was made under 0.01 BTC in a source. Is this a transaction other than the calculated number of bytes?

7-)Due to the halving practice, BTC mining rewards are halved every 210,000. Production is made by decreasing 50 BTC, 25 BTC, 12.5 BTC, 6.25 BTC. But when the checks are done, it is seen that 21 million BTC will never be produced, I have made many checks related to this, but even if there are very small fractions, it never reaches 21 million, and this is called the Zeno Paradox.  

For example;

   FEE (btc)           BLOCK                  YEAR         Produced BTC
   50                   210000                   2012          10.500.000,0000000000000
1   25                   210000                   2016      5.250.000,0000000000000
2   12,5                   210000                   2020      2.625.000,0000000000000
3   6,25                   210000                   2024      1.312.500,0000000000000
4   3,125           210000                   2028      656.250,0000000000000
5   1,5625           210000                   2032      328.125,0000000000000
6   0,78125           210000                   2036      164.062,5000000000000
7   0,390625           210000                   2040      82.031,2500000000000
8   0,1953125   210000                   2044      41.015,6250000000000
9   0,09765625   210000                   2048      20.507,8125000000000
10   0,048828125   210000                   2052      10.253,9062500000000
11   0,024414063   210000                   2056      5.126,9531250000000
12   0,012207031   210000                   2060      2.563,4765625000000
13   0,006103516   210000                   2064      1.281,7382812500000
14   0,003051758   210000                   2068      640,8691406250000
15   0,001525879   210000                   2072      320,4345703125000
16   0,000762939   210000                   2076      160,2172851562500
17   0,00038147   210000                   2080      80,1086425781250
18   0,000190735   210000                   2084      40,0543212890625
19   9,53674E-05   210000                   2088      20,0271606445312
20   4,76837E-05   210000                   2092      10,0135803222656
21   2,38419E-05   210000                   2096      5,0067901611328
22   1,19209E-05   210000                   2100      2,5033950805664
23   5,96046E-06   210000                   2104      1,2516975402832
24   2,98023E-06   210000                   2108      0,6258487701416
25   1,49012E-06   210000                   2112      0,3129243850708
26   7,45058E-07   210000                   2116      0,1564621925354
27   3,72529E-07   210000                   2120      0,0782310962677
28   1,86265E-07   210000                   2124      0,0391155481339
29   9,31323E-08   210000                   2128      0,0195577740669
30   4,65661E-08   210000                   2132      0,0097788870335
31   2,32831E-08   210000                   2136      0,0048894435167
32   1,16415E-08   210000                   2140      0,0024447217584
33   5,82077E-09   210000                   2144      0,0012223608792
34   2,91038E-09   210000                   2148      0,0006111804396
35   1,45519E-09   210000                   2152      0,0003055902198
36   7,27596E-10   210000                   2156      0,0001527951099
37   3,63798E-10   210000                   2160      0,0000763975549
38   1,81899E-10   210000                   2164      0,0000381987775
39   9,09495E-11   210000                   2168      0,0000190993887
40   4,54747E-11   210000                   2172      0,0000095496944
41   2,27374E-11   210000                   2176      0,0000047748472
42   1,13687E-11   210000                   2180      0,0000023874236
43   5,68434E-12   210000                   2184      0,0000011937118
44   2,84217E-12   210000                   2188      0,0000005968559
45   1,42109E-12   210000                   2192      0,0000002984279
46   7,10543E-13   210000                   2196      0,0000001492140
47   3,55271E-13   210000                   2200      0,0000000746070
               
                                                     20.999.999,9999999000

As a comment line in the code file named “amount.h” in this open source code on the site that publishes the open source codes of Bitcoins named Github.com, “Note that this constant is * not * the total money supply, which in Bitcoin currently happens to be less than 21,000,000 BTC for various reasons, but rather a sanity check ”.

Thank you very much for your help.