How can something as abstract as a bitcoin have any weight? It's just a number next to your name, isn't it? Well, think about your hard drive, on which your qt client sits. Imagine you have 100 GB of porn on it (you sick bastard). Well, as a pure file, your hundred dirty gigs take up physical space on your hard drive. Ultimately we can break down 100 gigabytes into a lot of bits. A bit is either a 0 or a 1; and your hard drive keeps track of them all. This eventually comes to create your files, in this case your exotic porn which is probably illegal somewhere on earth. The difference between the 0s and 1s is that the 1s have added weight, rather than just the empty 0s. For a 0 to be a 1, it has to receive an electrical charge. The electrons that compose this charge are (as cited by several sources) about forty thousand strong. Our scientist friends who have a lot of time and money to waste have calculated the weight of an electron to be 2.074108*10
-29 oz. This is, unsurprisingly, extremely small, but relevant. We know there's forty thousand electrons in a 1 that otherwise wouldn't be there, so we can conclude that a 1 weighs 8.296432*10
-25 oz. So, great, that's a 1. But how many bits are in your hundred gigs of questionably-legal-porn? Well, a gigabyte is basically 1,073,741,824 bytes. A byte is also divisible in that is is the manifestation of 8 bits. So, we can multiply the number of bits in a byte with the number of bytes in a gigabyte and... That's 8,589,934,592 bits in a gigabyte. But it's not just ONE gigabyte... No, you're too sick and tasteless for just ONE. You have one HUNDRED gigabytes of porn, which means you have 8,589,934,592,000 bits manifesting porn. So we know that a 1 weighs 8.296432*10
-25 oz but remember that bits compose of not just 1s but 0s as well. Typically this is pretty much half and half, and on this scale it's okay to just assume 50% 0s and 50% 1s, so if half of your porno-bits are 1s then that's 4,294,967,296,000 1s. The 0s we can just ignore, as without the 1s it'd be empty disk space. Now let's see how much these 1s weigh! A single 1 weighs 8.296432*10
-25 oz, so by multiplying that by the number of 1s in your whackass porn, 4,294,967,296,000, we'll get the weight in ounces of your 100 gigabytes! After punching that into my stock windows calculator, we find your dirty filez weigh 3.563290*10
-12 oz! This is basically 3 million millionths of an ounce. So fricking small nobody should even care. Not even me. But we do care, because now we want to know what our magic internet money weighs in at!
First we have to define what a bitcoin 'is.' Sure, your private key is what lets you SPEND your bitcoins but the number of BTC available for spending on any given private key is not always exactly 1. If a bitcoin isn't an address, it is what it looks like. What goes INTO the address. Below is a transaction I pulled randomly from a recent block.
Now, this is a full transaction. Not only is it a bitcoin, it's the transporter OF a bitcoin. That which makes the bitcoin move from point A to point B is spending previous outputs and creating new ones. The output of the transaction is the coin, without question or doubt. Let's have a look at the transaction in a more sophisticated manner (get your wine glass!)
{
"hash":"658b286847d57f01997dfe5fe557dadea3d17df74f3adff93487afba98e81a15",
"ver":1,
"vin_sz":2,
"vout_sz":1,
"lock_time":0,
"size":340,
"in":[
{
"prev_out":{
"hash":"8302fb1695cf8077d30e6a0c51dde3ba09c6850fb1ca6c9fa1cdc73788fa1307",
"n":1
},
"scriptSig":"3045022100e3a8a88d9354c894b69865cf872b699e3ce5a167c5610f7531e0e1bbcd56370002207810698af68911296b65c96aa619f5f0d82a413081bc45ef4567972f6535c59401 026e1c90bc590d4384c34821a34e7fad44d4e562b4fd106621f5f8d57b331107ba"
},
{
"prev_out":{
"hash":"2d3db3dc61639e06b5d39a1a2298fdd346ca9b7692b66ce934ac344b7226b4cf",
"n":1
},
"scriptSig":"30450221009ea9d8c150d9ec1b7e1dc248d47cae148cf481cdfc43c1209dfb5311639296ad022019233456cf51fca1a0267f409ee85f33162b5397198cbd9169cb84484953ecb101 0317e76906da1b7994598c18a373e1e66ee084d060a5608fc50989d664d768ff46"
}
],
"out":[
{
"value":"1.00000000",
"scriptPubKey":"OP_DUP OP_HASH160 03df0ccc7df89082fba7ea25313398b851b058bc OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG"
}
]
}Sure, this is the entire transaction. It's a file, 340 bytes. But we want the output. Conveniently, it is as codey and sophisticated as the transaction itself. It's right there, at the bottom of the transaction. That section labeled “out.” In txt format, the transaction as a whole appears to be 1,096 bytes. The output solely returned as 147 bytes. When expressed as a ratio to its 340 byte form on the blockchain, we will blatantly assume 46 bytes. That would be 368 bits to make our bitcoin. We know from earlier to assume that half of the bits are 1s. This is a bit riskier on such a tiny scale; but since I'm too lazy to measure it myself it's what we're going to do. 184 1s in this output. We know from earlier the weight of a 1 is typically 8.296432*10
-25 oz, so we can derive that the output “weighs” 1.526543
-22 oz on your computer. But that's your computer. How many other computers do these bits have to be represented on in order for there to be consensus that the bitcoin represented by them is there? Every node on the network has 1.526543
-22 oz dedicated to your bitcoin. This is a bit funky; Bitcoin is affected by gravity, but its effect is on every computer in the network. And as more computers join the network, the combined effect this coin has on the weight of the computers will grow. Someday there will be millions of nodes and they'll all remember your coin and in doing so they will weigh a little more because of it. Although the “weight” of a bitcoin is as incalculable as any physical aspect of it, we know it will have a lasting (although pathetic) effect for millenia after you yourself won't. RIP, you.
TL;DR: The weight of a bitcoin is fricking crazy. It doesn't make any sense and it doesn't have to. It's a fucking bitcoin and that's that, but it was cool to think about.
I wouldn't advise you to take this study for granted at some points, but I thought it would be a fun concept to ponder. Comments?
