OP “remotemass” is horribly incorrect. On a quick skim, I see that only
BrewMaster corrected OP’s misinformation. Does no one else on this thread know how Bitcoin works!?
This is important for users to understand.
Coin control is an important skill for:
- Protecting your privacy.
- Optimizing your transactions to reduce fees.
Yes, you
can split and merge coins. Knowing how that works is basic Bitcoin competence!
Any decent wallet software has an interface to show you the list of coins in your wallet, and to let you manually select coins to build a transaction.
In technical terms, “coins” are also known as
UTXOs (Unspent Transaction Outputs).The key point hereby is the difference between Bitcoin’s
UTXO model, and the
account model used by Ethereum and some other currencies:
Only balances associated with a bitcoin address
again there is no such thing as "address balance" in bitcoin. there are only coins some of which are unspent aka UTXOs that are kept in a database build by each node known as chainstate.
remotemass, stop spreading technical misinformation. Go to
Beginners & Help, learn how Bitcoin works, and don’t try to teach others until you know what you are talking about. You haven’t learned anything
in the past nine years, but it’s not too late to start!
The UTXO increases when you receive funds and decrease when you sign a transaction meaning when you spend your so called coins.Its just for simplification to normal people that Bitcoins are digital coins but in reality they don't have any physical existence but just funds stored in the form of UTXO in your wallets.
WRONG. Each UTXO (“coin”) can be spent only once. The balance of a UTXO can neither increase nor decrease. That is why change addresses are used: If the total amount of all the UTXOs used as inputs in a transaction exceeds the amount that you want to spend, then you need to send change back to yourself as a new UTXO (= a new coin).
The coins are just the balances where the unit is BTC (with 8 decimal places on the right) inferred from all previous unspent transactions to that bitcoin address.
Ok. I understand now why this was posted. I think that I can't answer to that correctly thoguh. I would need knowledge of the Bitcoin code to be precise in my reply. However, it is seems that this is the outcome of the whole system of the Bitcoin software and the blockchain. The balances that have as source all the transactions permanently recorded and stored in the blocks.
The part that you quoted is totally wrong. If you seek knowledge, disregard what remotemass said. Bitcoin addresses do NOT have balances. Rather, the reverse is the case: In simple terms,
each coin usually contains the address which is allowed to spend it (the address that received the coin). The coin can only be spent by the holder of the private key for that address.
That is the simple explanation—perhaps oversimplified. The way that it actually works, each UTXO contains a spend
script. To spend the coin, information must be provided that makes the script evaluate to a true value (nonzero item on top of the stack). The most common types of script simply require a digital signature from a public key which, when hashed, matches the hash contained within the script. In the user interface, that hash is expressed as an address.
The blockchain does not contain any addresses; an address only is a UI feature.