More on Bitcoin Transactions
To understand why digital signatures are integral to Bitcoin transactions, you'll need to learn a bit about the structure of Bitcoin transactions. This chapter will introduce you to what's happening "Behind the Scenes" in these transactions. We'll discuss this more in Unit 5.
Transactions in Detail
Earlier, we looked at the transaction Alice used to pay for coffee at Bob's coffee shop using a block explorer (Alice's transaction to Bob's Cafe).
The block explorer application shows a transaction from Alice's "address" to Bob's "address". This is a much simplified view of what is contained in a transaction. In fact, as we will see in this chapter, much of the information shown is constructed by the block explorer and is not actually in the transaction.
Figure 1. Alice's transaction to Bob's Cafe