i like to think of utxos as individual bills in my wallet, i buy somthing that cost 3$, i can give the cashier either 3 1$ bills or i can give them a 5, either way they keep that bill 'its destroyed' and give me change, a new utxo.

strictly just for understanding the utxo model has alot of other stuff thats over my head, but i think this is the req knowledge, at least one of the most important

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So sort of like a receipt?

No not really.

They are the 'bills' in my terrible analogy.

Unchained has a good explainer

https://youtu.be/0_5wb5agLqE?si

Right on. Thank you.πŸ‘ŠπŸ»

Basically in bitcoin there is a theoretical "bill" like a dollar bill for every amount between 21 quadrillion and .00000001. So when you send bitcoin it creates a bill in that amount in the recipient's address, we call that received "bill" a UTXO: unspent transaction output.

Awesome, thank for the further clarification, now I just need to get my old brain to accept it.I bookmarked it just in case. πŸ˜‚ Thanks again, appreciate it. πŸ‘ŠπŸ»

No prob πŸ‘Š

Set up your wallet so you can receive zaps!

I like the coin analogy. Your wallet is a bag of utxos (coins) of all different amounts.

If you buy a chocolate bar with a 20 btc coin and get 19.999 btc in change then you just doxxed how much bitcoin you have to the vendor.

but I don't send 20 btc coin and get 19 in change back. I send just 1. the vendor can see into my wallet because it's open for anyone to see but they have to look with mempool dot space or whatever. the transaction confirmation doesn't expose more than the 1 btc coin, in this example.

the 20 sized utxo was an example…

I get that, but when I send btc , im not sending 20 & getting 19 back.

yes you are unless you want to donate 19 to a miner. They are called change addressess

ok, I did not understand that. thx.

all good, np

Whale πŸ˜‚

and apparently i'm a hell of a tipper too. sending 20 & saying "keep the change" stops today, i'll tell ya!

replace with any amount. instead of 20 btc it could be 200k sats. the amounts are irrelevant .

a utxo can be as small as it wants but alot of node software prevents you from going below what is known as the dust limit.

It's probably the worst analogy possible, but you could think of UTXOs like ecash tokens. πŸ˜‚

Sure but you know the next question.....

What's ecash.

Just some advice, when trying to explain something, don't use a term you'd then have to further explain.

But I see your angle dawg

Oh, I agree with you 100%. My comment was largely in jest, although it does kinda work. πŸ˜‚

My go-to analogy is comparing UTXOs to gold coins. When you spend one, it is melted down, a small portion is taken by the network for the transaction fee, and new coins are minted from the remaining amount that are then provided to the recipient/s, and or returned to you if change is due.

If your recipient requires more than the value of a single "coin" you hold, you send multiple and they are melted down, and re-minted and distributed in the denominations you set when creating the transaction.

Lollll I was going to say something along the same