Bitcoin Transactions
Transactions in Detail
Transactions - Behind the Scenes
We can use Bitcoin Core's command-line interface (getrawtransaction and decoderawtransaction) to retrieve Alice's "raw" transaction, decode it, and see what it contains. The result looks like this:
{ "version": 1, "locktime": 0, "vin": [ { "txid": "7957a35fe64f80d234d76d83a2a8f1a0d8149a41d81de548f0a65a8a999f6f18", "vout": 0, "scriptSig" : "3045022100884d142d86652a3f47ba4746ec719bbfbd040a570b1deccbb6498c75c4ae24cb02204b9f039ff08df09cbe9f6addac960298cad530a863ea8f53982c09db8f6e3813[ALL] 0484ecc0d46f1918b30928fa0e4ed99f16a0fb4fde0735e7ade8416ab9fe423cc5412336376789d172787ec3457eee41c04f4938de5cc17b4a10fa336a8d752adf", "sequence": 4294967295 } ], "vout": [ { "value": 0.01500000, "scriptPubKey": "OP_DUP OP_HASH160 ab68025513c3dbd2f7b92a94e0581f5d50f654e7 OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG" }, { "value": 0.08450000, "scriptPubKey": "OP_DUP OP_HASH160 7f9b1a7fb68d60c536c2fd8aeaa53a8f3cc025a8 OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG", } ] }
You may notice a few things about this transaction, mostly the things that are missing! Where is Alice's address? Where is Bob's address? Where is the 0.1 input "sent" by Alice? In bitcoin, there are no coins, no senders, no recipients, no balances, no accounts, and no addresses. All those things are constructed at a higher level for the benefit of the user, to make things easier to understand.
You may also notice a lot of strange and indecipherable fields and hexadecimal strings. Don't worry, we will explain each field shown here in detail in this chapter.