Thanks to all the responders. I think I get this now. So the key realization for me is that several inputs to the same address never lose their identity in a balance sum.
It would be like a bank where you only put in cash and the deposit envelopes are never opened and the money all thrown in the same pile. Your bank statement would be just the series of deposits and withdrawals. When a withdrawal is made, you select enough of the (former) deposit envelopes to cover the payment and send them all, unopened to the payee. The payee accepts all the ones that can be accepted whole, and opens only the last one to make up the last bit, taking the remaining money, stuffing it a new deposit envelope and sending it to you as change.
Is that right? Seems at some point you have to break open an envelope and make a new one or you'd have a series of change request flying back and forth indefinitely.
Yeah, not bad. But it isn't the payee opening the envelopes and making change, it is the payer. And there is no bank, but the whole world is watching you open your envelopes and makes sure that you don't put more in your output envelopes than you took out of your input envelopes. |
|
|
|
Instead of having 21,000,000.00000001 you could move the decimal place 3 digits so we have a limit of 21,000,000,000.00001. (21 billion instead of 21 million.) More people could relate to that, and it would be a healthy economy. Another 3 decimal places and we're on par with a normal USD.
That is immensely unlikely to happen. It also wouldn't make for a "healthy economy". |
|
|
|
Ok, I've done some reading here about transactions, inputs and outputs, but I'm still a bit confused and I'm pretty sure it has to do with what the client does vs what the servers do.
Right now my wallet has approx. 3.6 bitcoins in it, which are the summation of a lot of smaller payments in to different addresses, plus a few smaller ones out.
But now I need to send most of that 3.6 to a friend to pay a monthly bill for server capacity. So what I'm confused about is since the blockchain doesn't hold the balance per se of any of the addresses, how many different "inputs" need to be summed and linked to a new input to make the transaction legit?
Specifically, what's confusing me is that the inputs to a transaction were the outputs from another transaction, which means they're just differences not balances, so how does the system know someone's not spending over their balance?
Thanks for your help in advance!
They aren't differences or balances like you are thinking. When you spend, you totally redeem one or more inputs, and create one or more outputs. The network checks to make sure that SUM(outputs)<=SUM(inputs) with the difference (if any) claimable by the miner that includes the transaction in a block as part of their generate transaction. That's all. Each output has a value, and the balance of your wallet is just the sum of all of the transaction outputs that you have keys that you could use to redeem. |
|
|
|
What you're saying makes a lot of sense and explains why I couldn't locate an easy answer. So, how do places like BitLotto operate? From what I can tell, a person sends Bitlotto a BitLotto-generated address for a particular draw. If the person wins, how would BitLotto know who to pay? BitLotto (and other online transaction sites) must have some way of knowing the source of funds.
They are probably doing something like what you are doing (more likely by reading the block chain directly, instead of making a ton of RPC calls). But please don't. |
|
|
|
You guys don't understand inflation, okay. You can't just go by one single item to calculate a consumer price index. You see, you've got to use item replacement because as tomato soup gets more expensive, people will switch to something else, like a boiling pot of cherry Kool-aid, which only costs about $.10. That plus the fact that you can get a first generation iPhone on ebay for $50, a 90% reduction in cost, means we're spiraling into a deflationary liquidity trap we at the Fed call "con-flation." So, we're cranking up the printers and buying all the homes in America. It won't cause a bubble: Trust Us(tm).
/Bernanke.
Is that a real quote from Bernanke? A paraphrase. And he isn't really responsible for the CPI manipulation, BLS does most of that. |
|
|
|
I think you dont see what i mean. I mean that at some point the useable bitcoins are way less. And the more far it goes in the future the worse the problem should become.
Or is there a way to get the money from an address that cant be accessed by his owner anymore? These bitcoins cant be used anymore. Maybe at the moment its only 100BTC but at some time it will be 100.000 and so on. Because no one can claim them anymore.
Its not that the value is gone. The medium to pay vanishes bit by bit.
Wrong?
So? The medium that remains becomes worth more in proportion to the amount lost. And we can renormalize if necessary to make the 1 remaining BTC divisible to more places. |
|
|
|
|
Welcome aboard. Been meaning to talk to you guys about a couple of things. Hopefully you have already thought of all of my ideas, and are working on them.
|
|
|
|
|
Money is not value; it is not wealth. Nothing important is lost when money is destroyed, not dollars, not bitcoins.
|
|
|
|
|
Your call to getrawtransaction just returns a huge hex string. You can feed that back into the decoderawtransaction RPC call to decode it.
From there, you have an array of transaction objects in vin. Each vin object has a member named txid, those are the transaction IDs of the transactions that were redeemed. You can take each of them and run them through getrawtransaction and then decoderawtransaction. That should give you the last address that had control of (some of) the coins that were sent to you.
Please note that there is absolutely positively no such concept of "sending address" in bitcoin. If you use the addresses that you coax out of the raw transaction API and send money to them, you are doing it wrong, and you will surely be sending coins to random people before long.
|
|
|
|
Good luck Luke-jr.
However, I think you are probably thrashing a dead horse since both Gavin A. and Jeff G. have indicated they will defend bitcoin's current level of traceability.
Did I miss something, or are you just trolling? |
|
|
|
Man this gives me a lot of anxiety because I plan to buy back some bullion in the near future. How the hell can I unsure, without wasting a lot of money, that what I buy will be real? Run one through a bandsaw. |
|
|
|
No one here believes that but you (and maybe a couple of others). It is hardly an established fact. It is, I think, the central question here, and you can't claim it as evidence of it's own truth. (To do so would be to beg the question.)
It's very simple logic. Value doesn't come from nowhere, so when you get value even though you just keep the money in the safe you must be getting it from someone who has created it. If this wasn't an ideological question for so many of you it would be much easier for you to see. Unfortunately it's like telling a communist that communism in reality undermines the welfare of the people. It is obvious if you don't desperately need to deny it for your ideology to make sense. If it is so obvious, why can't you offer a more convincing argument than merely saying it? Also, please read or listen to Bastiat's What is Money?. |
|
|
|
No, no, no. I'm saying that you can't just assert your position and expect us to accept it. You need to demonstrate it. That the majority of us won't buy it when you say "I'm right" doesn't mean that I'm arguing from popularity, it means that you are begging the question.
No, this is what your saying now, it is not what your original reply said. Actually, it is exactly what I said. I'll bold it for you. Voluntary exchange is what produces growth because both parties benefit -- not just lots of trades. In contrast, printing new fiat money (aka counterfeiting) is a form of involuntary exchange or theft. As I said, this is just hypocritical. If you call inflation theft then you are inconsistent when you don't call deflation an involuntary theft from those who invest to those who put the money in the safe. No one here believes that but you (and maybe a couple of others). It is hardly an established fact. It is, I think, the central question here, and you can't claim it as evidence of it's own truth. (To do so would be to beg the question.) |
|
|
|
Question... What would Nefario have gained by a deliberate lie?
What would he gain by a forced sale of my asset? What I was getting at was that you are calling for a scammer tag, but it is hard to see what the "scam" would have profited him. If there was a "mistake-er" tag on these forums for people that make mistakes, I think that might apply in this case, but from what I've seen, it seems pretty conclusive that the scammer tag does not. |
|
|
|
|
Question... What would Nefario have gained by a deliberate lie?
|
|
|
|
No it wasn't. Pointing out that people aren't likely to accept a bland assertion from you on the very point of debate is hardly an appeal to popularity.
You can call the argument whatever you like, saying it's wrong solely because most people don't believe it is the very definition of an argumentum ad populum. No, no, no. I'm saying that you can't just assert your position and expect us to accept it. You need to demonstrate it. That the majority of us won't buy it when you say "I'm right" doesn't mean that I'm arguing from popularity, it means that you are begging the question. |
|
|
|
No one here believes that but you (and maybe a couple of others).
I would expect nothing else on a forum which has a deflationary currency as topic. So, make an argument that isn't circular then. Pointing out inconsistency in an argument is not being circular, and yours was an argumentum ad populum. No it wasn't. Pointing out that people aren't likely to accept a bland assertion from you on the very point of debate is hardly an appeal to popularity. |
|
|
|
|
Shit, if you don't want to buy the shares, don't make an offer. Why does everyone feel the need to run their mouth all the time?
|
|
|
|
Ok, but do you understand you weren't hacked?
The client generates new addresses automatically. It's going to do that regardless of whether you get a new wallet or not.
The bitcoins you currently own are in the original wallet file that was in that directory. So do not delete or lose that file.
No. I have been involved with BTC for a while and never heard of a wallet changing its address. My question remains... how do people know where to send money to me ( or anyone else ) if the address is changing? I looked in the blockchain... and there is no connection with the new address. What you see is a fresh new address that has never been used. If someone wants to send you money, give them that address, and you'll get another one. The cool thing is that all of your old addresses are stored in the wallet database, and any money sent to those addresses at any time in the future will be yours, as long as you keep your wallet.dat safe. |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
