What happens to bitcoins sent to other addresses?

[digaran]

How exactly bitcoin addresses work? what determines whether an address is for bitcoin and not for it's clones or some altcoins?
What happens if you send bitcoin to other addresses or vice versa?
Is it possible to create an address offline? if so then how the system knows if it can deposit bitcoins in it or not?
Now what if a group of few thousands members decide to clone bitcoin and have control over a few considerably large volume exchanges and do trades then how can we tell the difference?
Or what if a bitcoin node which has the ledger tries to clone bitcoins by using the blockchain information in hard drive? or they just use blockchain as their clone's block chain?

What should people know when using different wallets and exchanges?
What happens if 50 nodes go offline or in a fake online environment and do transactions and do the confirming themselves? is it possible for miners to predict the hashes of future to be bitcoins and use it to create them and then the network verify those coins as legit ones?
Where exactly new bitcoins generated by which mechanism that is in nodes wallet software? which one of nodes creates the problems for miners to solve? and what if someone finds a way to make the system favor some selected miners? 

[1714512031]

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[ArcCsch]

Read about bitcoin, watch videos, read the whitepaper, read bitcoin wiki, google is your friend.
I am off to check your posts to see how on earth you became a Sr. Member.

[bigpattywhack]

How exactly bitcoin addresses work? what determines whether an address is for bitcoin and not for it's clones or some altcoins?
What happens if you send bitcoin to other addresses or vice versa?
Is it possible to create an address offline? if so then how the system knows if it can deposit bitcoins in it or not?
Now what if a group of few thousands members decide to clone bitcoin and have control over a few considerably large volume exchanges and do trades then how can we tell the difference?
Or what if a bitcoin node which has the ledger tries to clone bitcoins by using the blockchain information in hard drive? or they just use blockchain as their clone's block chain?

What should people know when using different wallets and exchanges?
What happens if 50 nodes go offline or in a fake online environment and do transactions and do the confirming themselves? is it possible for miners to predict the hashes of future to be bitcoins and use it to create them and then the network verify those coins as legit ones?
Where exactly new bitcoins generated by which mechanism that is in nodes wallet software? which one of nodes creates the problems for miners to solve? and what if someone finds a way to make the system favor some selected miners? 

Hows it you have 800 posts but don't know these basics? Watch some videos, read some books and if you're really interested in the nitty gritties learn to code since it'll give you the fundamental understanding of how it all comes together but don't expect to do any of this over night.

[digaran]

Read about bitcoin, watch videos, read the whitepaper, read bitcoin wiki, google is your friend.
I am off to check your posts to see how on earth you became a Sr. Member.

Really? I save your time by telling you that having ranks is just a matter of time and not knowledge or skills.
I don't want the information from wiki and google just refers to places like this forum? so first those infos need to exist and my questions aren't simple and they have many different answers, I wanted to know other people's answers and to see how many people think about such things and even if know any answers to my questions.
For second poster, so anyone going to use bitcoin and know the basics needs to be familiar with coding?

[achow101]

How exactly bitcoin addresses work?

Bitcoin addresses are a specific encoding (base 58 check encoding) of the RIPEMD160 of the SHA256 of a public key. This hash is known as the hash160 of a public key. When you enter an address into your wallet, it decodes the address into the hash160 and builds the proper output based upon the version number (the thing that decides whether an address begins with a '1' or a '3'). This output is used in your transaction.

what determines whether an address is for bitcoin and not for it's clones or some altcoins?

Nothing does. Generally a different version byte is chosen so that the prefix of the address will be different and thus distinguishable. However some altcoins do use the same version bytes and thus are indistinguishable from a Bitcoin address (e.g. litecoin's p2sh addresses are the same as bitcoin's). Other than that there is no difference as the addresses are still the base58 check encoding of the hash160 of an ECDSA public key.

What happens if you send bitcoin to other addresses or vice versa?

The Bitcoin goes to a normal output. Generally the coin is considered burned, but it is still possible to access it because the receiver of the transaction can simply import their private key from another coin and import it to the coin that was actually sent.

Is it possible to create an address offline? if so then how the system knows if it can deposit bitcoins in it or not?

Yes. Addresses do not need to register with anything to indicate that it can be sent to. As I said earlier, addresses are simply used to build transaction outputs. Transaction outputs don't care whether they are actually spendable, they just have to be valid outputs.

Now what if a group of few thousands members decide to clone bitcoin and have control over a few considerably large volume exchanges and do trades then how can we tell the difference?

The transactions made with the cloned coin will not have the same blockchain as Bitcoin. The transactions that they try to spend from do not exist on the Bitcoin network so their transactions are considered invalid.

Or what if a bitcoin node which has the ledger tries to clone bitcoins by using the blockchain information in hard drive? or they just use blockchain as their clone's block chain?

At the time of any fork of the blockchain, the attackers blockchain will diverge from the Bitcoin blockchain. If they try to steal coins that are not theirs, Bitcoin nodes will simply reject the transactions as invalid. Sure they will have the coins on their blockchain, but no one cares about that because that blockchain is not Bitcoin's.

What should people know when using different wallets and exchanges?

They all must follow the consensus rules in order to be using Bitcoin.

What happens if 50 nodes go offline or in a fake online environment and do transactions and do the confirming themselves?

Then they have forked the blockchain and their transactions and blocks will not be considered valid. With the current difficulty, their chain would lose.

is it possible for miners to predict the hashes of future to be bitcoins and use it to create them and then the network verify those coins as legit ones?

No, that is not how Bitcoin works. First of all, hashes are randomly distributed, so you cannot predict a hash. Secondly, Bitcoins are not objects. Rather they are values assigned to transaction outputs.

Where exactly new bitcoins generated by which mechanism that is in nodes wallet software?

When a miner mines a block, they include, as the first transaction in their block, a coin generation transaction. This transaction has no inputs and creates one or more outputs whose values are at most the sum of the block subsidy (currently 12.5 Bitcoin) and all of the transaction fees paid by the transactions in the block.

which one of nodes creates the problems for miners to solve?

No node does that. Miners don't actually solve problems. What they do is they build an 80 byte block header which consists of a version number, timestamp, the previous block hash, merkle root of all transactions in the block, the current target, and a nonce. Then that is hashed with SHA256 double. This hash is then compared to the current target. If it is less than the target, then the block is valid and broadcast to the rest of the network. If it is invalid, the miner changes something in the header (usually the nonce, then the merkle root) until a valid hash is found.

and what if someone finds a way to make the system favor some selected miners?  

The Bitcoin network does not choose a miner to win. All miners attempt to find a valid hash for the current block. It is a competition, and only one wins. If multiple miners solve a block simultaneously, the block considered the winner is the one that is built on top of next. A sustained fork is incredibly unlikely to happen.


I highly suggest that you do your own research into how Bitcoin works. There is lots of documentation on all of the technical inner workings of Bitcoin. A good place to start is the developer documentation on bitcoin.org.

[ArcCsch]

667 words total (excluding quotes)

You actually took the time to write this? 

[achow101]

667 words total (excluding quotes)

You actually took the time to write this?  

Yes, gotta increase my post count  

But seriously, OP asked some questions, I answered. He clearly has a lack of understanding of how Bitcoin works, so I am taking the time to inform him. Of course he should do his own research and not rely on hand-holding and the good will of strangers to answer his questions. But simply saying "You don't understand Bitcoin, do your own research" simply is not helping, especially if you don't point him to any good resources on how it works.

Also, regarding his current rank and lack of knowledge, having a high ranking account does not mean that you should understand Bitcoin. It just means that you are active on the forum for a while or bought a high ranking account. Don't expect much out of high ranking members unless they have shown a history of knowledge and understanding.

[digaran]

667 words total (excluding quotes)

You actually took the time to write this?  

Yes, gotta increase my post count  

But seriously, OP asked some questions, I answered. He clearly has a lack of understanding of how Bitcoin works, so I am taking the time to inform him. Of course he should do his own research and not rely on hand-holding and the good will of strangers to answer his questions. But simply saying "You don't understand Bitcoin, do your own research" simply is not helping, especially if you don't point him to any good resources on how it works.

Also, regarding his current rank and lack of knowledge, having a high ranking account does not mean that you should understand Bitcoin. It just means that you are active on the forum for a while or bought a high ranking account. Don't expect much out of high ranking members unless they have shown a history of knowledge and understanding.

After reading someone posted saying that he/she wants to do study on bitcoin I provided some info but not the technicalities and that got me thinking about a few questions that I needed the answers in one place for reference.
Problem many people facing and the reason for not using bitcoin is because of the same lack of knowledge and the process needed to fully and truly understand them simply scares away the general population.

And no this isn't a bought account, and things you said is like satoshi himself telling them I want to know if others knowing those things and are not part of the bitcointalk or bitcoin.org group of experts.
But again the results I was looking for are the same, either have the skills in coding and understanding of crypto and mathematics and mechanisms involved or trust the experts which in my case I'm trying to see how many nice and skillful polite experts like yourself are here that I am trusting them and could refer people to for knowing them, read their posts and decide for themselves if they want to enter crypto world and not just take my words.


In case if any one wondering if I'm just trying to make more posts for my signature? I will not post again here if not needed and will edit my already submitted posts.

[jeraldskie11]

the bitcoin when receive to other addresses ofcourse the bitcoin will go to the address that you sent. And you can't vise versa it but if you are the owner of the address that you sended bitcoin you can do vise-versa.

[amaclin]

Yes, gotta increase my post count  

May I ask you to repeat your answer for me?
Slowly. I am not sure that I've got everything

[BuySomeBitcoins]

667 words total (excluding quotes)

You actually took the time to write this?  

Yes, gotta increase my post count  

But seriously, OP asked some questions, I answered. He clearly has a lack of understanding of how Bitcoin works, so I am taking the time to inform him. Of course he should do his own research and not rely on hand-holding and the good will of strangers to answer his questions. But simply saying "You don't understand Bitcoin, do your own research" simply is not helping, especially if you don't point him to any good resources on how it works.

Also, regarding his current rank and lack of knowledge, having a high ranking account does not mean that you should understand Bitcoin. It just means that you are active on the forum for a while or bought a high ranking account. Don't expect much out of high ranking members unless they have shown a history of knowledge and understanding.

You answer did not just help OP, but many readers.

I shared the link to your answer already on other forums where people had the same questions.

[Decoded]

An address does not store any Bitcoins, just like your bank number doesn't store your money. An address is just a representation of your balance, the difference between the total inputs and outputs of your account.

An address is the output of a cryptographic function. The network will not accept anything that's not valid.

If you send Bitcoin to an address that is used by an altcoin, if it's valid, it will send to the address on the Bitcoin network. Understand that all possible addresses exist, except that they haven't been used before. So you'll send to that address on the Bitcoin network.

[DuddlyDoRight]

Somebody will explain it...

...It's a part of a coin from a miner passed on and verified with crypto so each transaction doesn't have to trace back to it being mined.. All transactions are on a single ledger some wallet software host the ledger on verified mirrors and just send you block headers for it for efficiency over low-bandwidth and low-space..

I think this is actually more technical than at least 80% of the threads here no matter if it is a duplicate or whatever..

[meemiinii]

what happen if it is sent to a different address? well once bitcoin is sent to a certain address, theres no turning back or a rewind. IT CANNOT BE UNDO! so i suggest to try to copy paste and double check the address before sending bitcoins or altcoins.

[amaclin]

what happen if it is sent to a different address? well once bitcoin is sent to a certain address,
theres no turning back or a rewind. IT CANNOT BE UNDO!

It can. Give me your address, I will send you small amount and then I will take it back.

[morantis]

How exactly bitcoin addresses work? what determines whether an address is for bitcoin and not for it's clones or some altcoins?
What happens if you send bitcoin to other addresses or vice versa?
Is it possible to create an address offline? if so then how the system knows if it can deposit bitcoins in it or not?
Now what if a group of few thousands members decide to clone bitcoin and have control over a few considerably large volume exchanges and do trades then how can we tell the difference?
Or what if a bitcoin node which has the ledger tries to clone bitcoins by using the blockchain information in hard drive? or they just use blockchain as their clone's block chain?

What should people know when using different wallets and exchanges?
What happens if 50 nodes go offline or in a fake online environment and do transactions and do the confirming themselves? is it possible for miners to predict the hashes of future to be bitcoins and use it to create them and then the network verify those coins as legit ones?
Where exactly new bitcoins generated by which mechanism that is in nodes wallet software? which one of nodes creates the problems for miners to solve? and what if someone finds a way to make the system favor some selected miners? 

i was speaking to the high school students nearby about bitcoin and used this not entirely correct basic framework explanation.  every transaction gets broadcast to the entire network.  once there is a large number of them, those transaction are bundled into a block, the block is encrypted and the encryption password is thrown away.  then, the whole network tries to hack that block.  this creates enough work and enough consensual agreement that once cracked by enough separate people, the network assumes the information to be true.  this is an oversimplification and does not describe the transitions from one block to another and the true nature of the hashes, but it gets the point across,

as far as forks, anyone can completely fork bitcoin in an hour, maybe a little more. forking the code without changing things like the merkle, the name, the acronym, and other things will create a new separate version of bitcoin, you can even clone that coin and have two or more wallets that share this wrong fork.  as soon as the wallets and daemons are started, the false block chain starts.  you can be impressed by the number of mined bitcoins you have in your wallet, but it simply will not ever be part of the main network.  the blocks your wallet sends will never get confirmed and never be accepted.  you can try to send coins from these bad wallets and it will look right at first, but it won't work.  if you try to send btc from the bad fork to anyone on the good fork, they won't get the tx.  it would be like taking a bank of america check into capital bank and expecting them to cash it.

as far as exchanges and main stream websites, even a large group of people with your "bitcoin" cannot interact with those sites,  the addresses will be right, but your private keys are different for those same addresses.  so, push comes to shove, your huge group gets more powerful and bigger than the original bitcoin, and you simply have another bitcoin, possibly with value, but the old sites, with balances won't work with the same coins, they may switch to yours, but the old bitcoin balances are lost.  so yes, you and millions of friends can take the name, the acronym and the popularity of bitcoin with a different fork, but never touch the first block chain with your coin.

if you end up playing with a coin called burstcoin, you may see this in person.  you can use your wallet software before the blockchain has finished downloading and you occasionally screw up and end up with a forked burstcoin, you split from the pack at some point and your last several transactions are simply wasted.

i am talking a lot and your last paragraph is pretty intense, i will throw these things out there.  in the block chain, part of the hash of a new block is created from the last block.  using any method to create a separate chain from the main chain will be the same as i described above, your second fake block will have a hash based on YOUR first fake block and that is where the failures begin.  wallets are like bank accounts, exchanges are sites that allow people to buy and sell bitcoin and other coins to other people, the prices go up and down based on what people will pay.  i believe that the computer that solves the last block creates the new one. as far as offline nodes

1. there are so many that they will never all go offline

2. if they did go offline, they process would simply begin again as nodes come online

3. ANY blocks created away from the main network will never make a change to the main block chain

and no, you cannot predict any hash for a future block because part of that hash comes from the previous solved block, so you are trying to guess what your grandchild will name their kid before you have even had children.

[DuddlyDoRight]

My small paragraph is 100% accurate and says the same thing..

Forked source wallets won't work on main ledger? They will.. There is nothing stopping them.. Wallets with hard coded or configured forked ledgers can easily be modified to work with the big main ledger too..

Nothing in BTC is complex. The hardest stuff is finding white listed script tricks or things not checked for and all that is just looking through GIT repos hour after hour day after day and it's pretty easy to read source code..

[morantis]

My small paragraph is 100% accurate and says the same thing..

Forked source wallets won't work on main ledger? They will.. There is nothing stopping them.. Wallets with hard coded or configured forked ledgers can easily be modified to work with the big main ledger too..

Nothing in BTC is complex. The hardest stuff is finding white listed script tricks or things not checked for and all that is just looking through GIT repos hour after hour day after day and it's pretty easy to read source code..

i can't see it.  let's try it this way

fork X....the current bitcoin accepted code with the current block chain that is consensus accepted
fork Y....exactly cloned fork, nothing changed from merkle up

comparing block zero 0...all math is the same so they should match

block 1 receives hash data from block 0 on both chains and if only one person has created a key pair, then i believe the data would still match sending identical data to block 2 as a hash

but, as soon as fork y sends transaction data to a block that is not identical to the original block chain, that block will forward a different hash to the next block and no other block will match again.

sending fork y's new blocks to same network will not be a rejection per se, its code, not a person, but each new block that fork y sends will simply be the runner up with the first block chain having already confirmed over and over a different set of data.

i have looked at early blocks and there are a good number of addresses in there, so i assume the confirmations are very high. 

i am not saying that what i have said is correct, but it is my understanding of the system, please correct me if i am wrong

[DuddlyDoRight]

My small paragraph is 100% accurate and says the same thing..

Forked source wallets won't work on main ledger? They will.. There is nothing stopping them.. Wallets with hard coded or configured forked ledgers can easily be modified to work with the big main ledger too..

Nothing in BTC is complex. The hardest stuff is finding white listed script tricks or things not checked for and all that is just looking through GIT repos hour after hour day after day and it's pretty easy to read source code..

i can't see it.  let's try it this way

fork X....the current bitcoin accepted code with the current block chain that is consensus accepted
fork Y....exactly cloned fork, nothing changed from merkle up

comparing block zero 0...all math is the same so they should match

block 1 receives hash data from block 0 on both chains and if only one person has created a key pair, then i believe the data would still match sending identical data to block 2 as a hash

but, as soon as fork y sends transaction data to a block that is not identical to the original block chain, that block will forward a different hash to the next block and no other block will match again.

sending fork y's new blocks to same network will not be a rejection per se, its code, not a person, but each new block that fork y sends will simply be the runner up with the first block chain having already confirmed over and over a different set of data.

i have looked at early blocks and there are a good number of addresses in there, so i assume the confirmations are very high.  

i am not saying that what i have said is correct, but it is my understanding of the system, please correct me if i am wrong

I didn't mean you could port coins between them... Because all coins are sourced from miners layered in the confirmations.

[buwaytress]

How exactly bitcoin addresses work?

Bitcoin addresses are a specific encoding (base 58 check encoding) of the RIPEMD160 of the SHA256 of a public key. This hash is known as the hash160 of a public key. When you enter an address into your wallet, it decodes the address into the hash160 and builds the proper output based upon the version number (the thing that decides whether an address begins with a '1' or a '3'). This output is used in your transaction.

what determines whether an address is for bitcoin and not for it's clones or some altcoins?

Nothing does. Generally a different version byte is chosen so that the prefix of the address will be different and thus distinguishable. However some altcoins do use the same version bytes and thus are indistinguishable from a Bitcoin address (e.g. litecoin's p2sh addresses are the same as bitcoin's). Other than that there is no difference as the addresses are still the base58 check encoding of the hash160 of an ECDSA public key.

What happens if you send bitcoin to other addresses or vice versa?

The Bitcoin goes to a normal output. Generally the coin is considered burned, but it is still possible to access it because the receiver of the transaction can simply import their private key from another coin and import it to the coin that was actually sent.

Is it possible to create an address offline? if so then how the system knows if it can deposit bitcoins in it or not?

Yes. Addresses do not need to register with anything to indicate that it can be sent to. As I said earlier, addresses are simply used to build transaction outputs. Transaction outputs don't care whether they are actually spendable, they just have to be valid outputs.

Now what if a group of few thousands members decide to clone bitcoin and have control over a few considerably large volume exchanges and do trades then how can we tell the difference?

The transactions made with the cloned coin will not have the same blockchain as Bitcoin. The transactions that they try to spend from do not exist on the Bitcoin network so their transactions are considered invalid.

Or what if a bitcoin node which has the ledger tries to clone bitcoins by using the blockchain information in hard drive? or they just use blockchain as their clone's block chain?

At the time of any fork of the blockchain, the attackers blockchain will diverge from the Bitcoin blockchain. If they try to steal coins that are not theirs, Bitcoin nodes will simply reject the transactions as invalid. Sure they will have the coins on their blockchain, but no one cares about that because that blockchain is not Bitcoin's.

What should people know when using different wallets and exchanges?

They all must follow the consensus rules in order to be using Bitcoin.

What happens if 50 nodes go offline or in a fake online environment and do transactions and do the confirming themselves?

Then they have forked the blockchain and their transactions and blocks will not be considered valid. With the current difficulty, their chain would lose.

is it possible for miners to predict the hashes of future to be bitcoins and use it to create them and then the network verify those coins as legit ones?

No, that is not how Bitcoin works. First of all, hashes are randomly distributed, so you cannot predict a hash. Secondly, Bitcoins are not objects. Rather they are values assigned to transaction outputs.

Where exactly new bitcoins generated by which mechanism that is in nodes wallet software?

When a miner mines a block, they include, as the first transaction in their block, a coin generation transaction. This transaction has no inputs and creates one or more outputs whose values are at most the sum of the block subsidy (currently 12.5 Bitcoin) and all of the transaction fees paid by the transactions in the block.

which one of nodes creates the problems for miners to solve?

No node does that. Miners don't actually solve problems. What they do is they build an 80 byte block header which consists of a version number, timestamp, the previous block hash, merkle root of all transactions in the block, the current target, and a nonce. Then that is hashed with SHA256 double. This hash is then compared to the current target. If it is less than the target, then the block is valid and broadcast to the rest of the network. If it is invalid, the miner changes something in the header (usually the nonce, then the merkle root) until a valid hash is found.

and what if someone finds a way to make the system favor some selected miners?  

The Bitcoin network does not choose a miner to win. All miners attempt to find a valid hash for the current block. It is a competition, and only one wins. If multiple miners solve a block simultaneously, the block considered the winner is the one that is built on top of next. A sustained fork is incredibly unlikely to happen.


I highly suggest that you do your own research into how Bitcoin works. There is lots of documentation on all of the technical inner workings of Bitcoin. A good place to start is the developer documentation on bitcoin.org.

First of all, must say I appreciate the staff member who took the trouble to answer each question. For readers like myself, who were complete newbies when we first found bitcoin and whose technical knowledge is at a beginner's level, these questions are actually not as simple as they may appear to a lot of forum users here. You might see also that I'm a Full Member and still consider myself perhaps at the lower 1% percentile in terms of bitcoin technical understanding.

Yes, we do attempt to do our own reading, or else we would not know how to ask questions like the above.

It is helpful to point out developer documentation but again, they are quite complex for someone like myself. Hell, even reading whitepapers on this forum is a confusing chore but I try to do as much reading as I can. On the other hand, more accessible and simpler documents are outdated (for example, I read all about fees and confirmation times from the wikis but found this to be different from practice - blockchain.info also only recently updated their estimated confirmation message on a tx page).

What I'm trying to say here is that... if posters don't want to help or answer, it's fine but you don't have to patronise users who may genuinely seek simple explanations.

Thank you again to the Staff Member who responded. Some answers gave me information I had never been aware of. The burnt bitcoins for example:
"The Bitcoin goes to a normal output. Generally the coin is considered burned, but it is still possible to access it because the receiver of the transaction can simply import their private key from another coin and import it to the coin that was actually sent."

Did you mean to say I could retrieve mistakenly burnt Bitcoin by import my alt's private key into, for example, Electrum?