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Title: silly question - sending bitcoint for buying stuff Post by: newguy05 on May 28, 2013, 07:16:49 PM Hi i have a silly question, when you send bitcoin to someone like friedcat to buy stuff, how do they know it's from you?
I mean you can give them your public key you used to send, but that's not exactly secret, if someone knows your public key, couldnt they just pretend to be you and said they sent the coin? Or is the only way to create a 1 use public key and not tell anyone except the person you sent the coins to? i am confused. Thanks Title: Re: silly question - sending bitcoint for buying stuff Post by: Winterfrost on May 28, 2013, 07:25:10 PM When you look at the transaction in the blockchain, it has the originating addresses and the receiving addresses. Take this transaction for example: http://blockchain.info/tx/d698fa3d50a46b6846340d3b2e10891d83b8b7220ac58d0cf0af0241ca450cf2
It shows that the coins came from 1KJkaa4JJH65CGvCxL4ztpmzWcHHXjPYWy, with 1 BTC going to 1H7A8Mj329FzLKnsyooFSPzyt3521E6dGn and 2.01 BTC going to 1QEoAfJD4scjgpU7m1Ca1KiYZ4cgucreRA. When sending coins as a payment, the seller usually generated a unique address for each transaction with each person (or at least he should). If you want to prove that you own an address without sending coins, most bitcoin clients have a function that allows you to sign a message with an address's private key. |