I noticed there seems to be quite a lot of confusion among the general public about the question whether or not bitcoin transactions are anonymous. In this article I will therefore answer one of the most frequent questions I hear about bitcoin, more in particular “Are bitcoin transactions anonymous?” Bitcoin transactions are not anonymous. The bitcoin blockchain is an immutable …
What is the bitcoin halving?
A recurring question I hear from friends who are new to bitcoin is “What is the bitcoin halving?”. Bitcoin miners are incentivized to secure the bitcoin network with the coinbase reward. The coinbase reward is an amount of new bitcoin that is created each time a block is added to the bitcoin blockchain. The coinbase reward decreases by a factor …
What is Segregated Witness (SegWit)?
A number of people who have been learning about bitcoin have recently asked me what is meant by the term ‘Segregated Witness‘ (abbreviated as SegWit). Therefore, I decided to dedicate this article to the question “What is Segregated Witness (SegWit)?” Segregated Witness is a change in the structure of bitcoin transactions, whereby signatures (‘witness‘ data) are separated from the list …
Where are unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) stored?
Whenever someone sends an amount of bitcoin, one or more locked unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) are unlocked and used as the inputs for the bitcoin transaction. The output(s) of the bitcoin transaction are newly created locked UTXOs, which in turn can be used as future transaction inputs by the new owner (i.e. the person holding the private key associated with …
How Are Changes Made To Bitcoin?
When I started to learn about bitcoin back in 2014, one of the first questions I remember asking myself was “how are changes made to bitcoin?”. So, I did some research to find out how exactly the bitcoin source code gets continuously updated overtime. How are changes made to bitcoin? The source code for the bitcoin project named Bitcoin Core …
How is the bitcoin mining difficulty calculated?
In this article we will explore the commonly heard question “How is the bitcoin mining difficulty calculated?” The mining difficulty depends on the difficulty target, meaning the difficulty at which the computing power of the bitcoin network is able to solve the proof-of-work algorithm on average in 10 minutes. It is automatically adjusted every 2,016 blocks, based on the time …