What are witness and signscript used for?

[BoiCrypto]

As you can see I'm new to the forum and have made the decision to become more knowledgeable about the technical parts of bitcoin technology before I start my trips with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. How do I make a new wallet? What exchange can I trust?

The second question is: What makes a signscript and witness different in a transaction, and what are they used  for? What will I be using them for if I want to use bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that call for a signscript and a witness?

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[DifDrama]

How do I make a new wallet?

One common way is to use a reputable wallet software or app, like Bitcoin Core, which is the original Bitcoin wallet. and here is its official website: https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/

The scriptSig contains the signature created by the private key of the sender to prove ownership of the funds being spent. It also includes the public key or address of the sender. This signature is used to verify that the sender is authorized to spend the funds. While the scriptWitness contains additional data required for certain types of transactions, such as Segregated Witness (SegWit) transactions. SegWit is a technology that separates the signature (witness data) from the transaction data, which helps reduce transaction malleability and increase block capacity.

[pooya87]

How do I make a new wallet?

First your choose a wallet then you install that and follow the on-screen instructions. I suggest Electrum.

What makes a signscript and witness different in a transaction, and what are they used  for? What will I be using them for if I want to use bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that call for a signscript and a witness?

You don't need to know any of that to use bitcoin, the wallet takes care of it under the hood.

If you want to gain extra knowledge; bitcoin transactions contain smart contracts that act similar to locks and keys. Each transaction contains outputs that contain the "locking script" also known as scriptpub to spend these outputs you need to provide the "unlocking script" that for legacy transactions is placed in "scriptsig" and for SegWit transactions it is placed in "witness" part of the transaction.
Execution of these two parts together will automatically determine if you can spend those coins or not.

[nc50lc]

As you can see I'm new to the forum and have made the decision to become more knowledgeable about the technical parts of bitcoin technology before I start my trips with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
-snip-

Then, you need to find a good resource with basic and technical articles about Bitcoin,
then just "forum search" what you can't understand; if it's not discussed yet, create a NewTopic.

Other famous cryptocurrencies work differently so you'll need a different resource for those
but some are straight-up copy of Bitcoin so what you'll about to learn is applicable to those bunch.

I'd suggest you to read everything from this website, it's a good start:

• https://learnmeabitcoin.com/beginners/
• https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/

[EL MOHA]

As you can see I'm new to the forum and have made the decision to become more knowledgeable about the technical parts of bitcoin technology before I start my trips with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. How do I make a new wallet? What exchange can I trust?

There are many useful threads on the forum that you can use to gain the technical knowledge you want. You can make use of the search function for to search any but here is a beginners and help encyclopedia by Ratimov with almost all the necessary information or useful threads on the forum there.

For wallet this particularly thread on Bitcoin wallets will answer your question, but from forum suggestions and security reasons, you should use the electrum wallet for bitcoin storage and Unstoppable for multi cryptocurrency storage.

On the issue of Exchange, you can use decentralized exchange which is preferred to than centralized exchanges because of KYC protocols like Bisq. Do not leave your coins on any exchange because not your keys not your coins

[NotATether]

What exchange can I trust?

Use one of these exchanges.

The second question is: What makes a signscript and witness different in a transaction, and what are they used  for? What will I be using them for if I want to use bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that call for a signscript and a witness?

Sigscript, not signscript.

All transactions have a sigscript and that is used for proving that the person making the transaction has access to said address, in order to spend some amount of bitcoins.

Witness data is used in transactions involving Segwit addresses as the area to store this proof data instead of in the sigscript itself, since it saves on fees and also prevents a special condition called transaction malleability where you can have two different txids for the same transaction.