I wanted to write a longwinded post about how I conceptualised understanding a UTXO in my head

I know it’s easy now for you to understand but you have to remember, a lot of Bitcoiners start off hearing all these terms and they are very confusing and mysterious

And obviously I’m not teaching you to suck eggs, I know most of you know exactly what this means but for me, I kept seeing the term and didn’t have a clue

So the thing or things that made it click were two parts

The first was, when I was reading about all this quantum fud online, the authors of these posts were explaining about the use of bc1q addresses being currently quantum safe
Which obviously piqued my interest, so I would have to research exactly why this is, but basically if you have some corn in an address and you spend ‘some’ of it, not all of it, the address becomes ‘spent from’ meaning that technically the private key could theoretically be derived by a quantum hack
So that’s when the light bulb moment went on for the U in UTXO, it stands for Unspent, so it’s just Bitcoin sitting in an address that hasn’t been spent from, so literally Unspent

So to be clear for any new Bitcoiners reading this, sending corn to a new bc1q address and leaving it untouched is currently safe from quantum

And then the second part was when I was transferring my sats from my DCA electrum wallet to cold storage, I have to say that electrum wallet is pretty cool, you can choose from your list of clean addresses
I had lots of separate dca buys in different addresses and because the fees were low, I knew I had time to consolidate at some point
And at the point of me sending all those sats from different addresses in electrum to cold storage, effectively it clumps together all those amounts and sends them as one, technically this is my interpretation and not factually correct obviously
But I noticed in the summary, it said 15 inputs and 1 output

And another lightbulb moment, the O in UTXO stands for Output, literally just the sats that end up in a new address

Obviously the TX in UTXO stands for transaction and that is the process of broadcasting your sats from address to address

I know it’s cringeworthy if you know this stuff and I’m sorry if that was painful to read, but there are a lot of plebs that are too scared to ask, for fear of looking stupid

So if this helps a new Bitcoiner, you’re welcome 🙏

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 11h

https://river.com/learn/bitcoins-utxo-model/

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @RadentorForNoxus 13h

I know it's cringeworthy if you know this stuff

Not at all, everyone gotta start somewhere. What you did well here is re-explaining newly-learned ideas (which imo reinforce the understanding of that topic). Well explained !