From 70cf29b095023026725a42f90e31e020528a3793 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Shannon Appelcline Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2018 15:46:37 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] Added some depth to question of fungibility. --- 03_4_Receiving_a_Transaction.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/03_4_Receiving_a_Transaction.md b/03_4_Receiving_a_Transaction.md index 21955dc..897604b 100644 --- a/03_4_Receiving_a_Transaction.md +++ b/03_4_Receiving_a_Transaction.md @@ -116,7 +116,7 @@ $ bitcoin-cli listunspent } ] ``` -Note that bitcoins are not just a homogeneous mess of cash jammed into your pocket. Each individual transaction that you receive or that you send is placed into the immutable blockchain ledger, in a block. You can see these individual transactions when you look at your unspent money. Note also that this means that bitcoin spending isn't quite as anonymous as you'd think. Though the addresses are fairly private, transactions can be examined as they go in and out of addresses. This makes the funds ultimately fungible and makes the privacy vulnerable to statistical analysis. +Note that bitcoins are not just a homogeneous mess of cash jammed into your pocket. Each individual transaction that you receive or that you send is placed into the immutable blockchain ledger, in a block. You can see these individual transactions when you look at your unspent money. This means that bitcoin spending isn't quite as anonymous as you'd think. Though the addresses are fairly private, transactions can be examined as they go in and out of addresses. This makes privacy vulnerable to statistical analysis. It also introduces some potential non-fungibility to bitcoins, as you can track back through series of transactions, even if you can't track a specific "bitcoin". _Why are all of these bitcoin amounts in fractions?_ Bitcoins are produced slowly, and so there are relatively few in circulation. As a result, each bitcoin over on the mainnet is worth quite a bit (~ $1,000 at the time of this writing). This means that people usually work in fractions. In fact, .47 BTC would be quite a lot in the real-world. You'll often be dealing with even smaller fractions on mainnet. For this reason, names have appeared for smaller amounts of bitcoins, including millibitcoins or mBTCs (one-thousandth of a bitcoin), microbitcoins or bits or μBTCs (one-millionth of a bitcoin), and satoshis (one hundred millionth of a bitcoin).