Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Spending Bitcoin Transactions

Is this the way it works??

Spending bitcoin is  convenient term because we are used to spending dollars and cents.  That is our frame for spending money.  However that is not really how bitcoin is spent.  What is spent from a Bitcoin Wallet is the transaction that brought the bitcoin into the wallet.  A unique numbered transaction and an associated variable number of bitcoin transacted.

When the transaction in an account is spent, it appears that it is spent entirely.  And there are two cases in which it is spent entirely.

Case 1: The amount spent from the wallet is less than the amount of the selected initial received transaction amount of bitcoin.  In that case the amount to be paid to the recipient is deducted from the existing transaction amount in the wallet paid the payee and the remainder change is paid back to the same owners wallet in a new account.

Case 2:  The amount expended from the wallet is equal to or greater than the amount to be paid to a recipient.  If it happens to be coincidentally equal then the total amount associated with the transaction in the wallet is paid.  In the case where it is greater then the additional amount is paid in accordance with case 1 or case 2 from a 2nd selected transaction in the wallet until the total amount to be paid to the payee plus change back to the owners wallet is is equal to a total of the on hand amount in all the selected transactions in the wallet necessary to make the transaction.

Transfer of bitcoin from one wallet to another is really done in denomination amounts.  Not 1,5,10 or 20's but in whatever the variable amount of selected transactions in the wallet happen to be.

It might be more accurate to say that bitcoin is paid from the wallet in transaction denominations where the denomination amount is variable, not fixed.  Perhaps roughly analogous to paying with a handful of IOU's each received from a different person in a different amount.  Just like we might pay a $37 dollar bill with some combination of denominated dollar uniquely serialized bills.

Is that the way it works?  If so then a logic map might be a better way to explain it.

If Bitcoin payments are viewed as spending transanctions as denominated amounts from a wallet then the spending concept falls into place in relationship to the entire system.

Looking at it in this way then a difference between the Bitcoin Model and my DigitalDollar mode is:

In the Bitcoin Model money is spent in variable denominations dictated by transactions in the spending wallet.

In my DigitalDollar model the only denomination of money spent is the single unit serialized dollar with a value of one.  As many of these dollars are payed out as necessary to make the payment amount rounded up to the next whole dollar with change back from the payee as necessary to accomplish the exact amount of payment.   Change may either be accumulated and converted when it reaches or exceeds one dollar or used to complete less than dollar payment requirements.  That depends on which method is overall more efficient from a system standpoint.


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