How Bitcoin Transactions Work: What Happens After You Hit Send
When you send bitcoin, nothing physical moves anywhere. Your wallet selects the digital "bills" you already received, signs a permission slip with your private key, and broadcasts it to thousands of computers around the world. Miners then seal it into a block roughly every ten minutes. The whole journey usually takes somewhere between ten minutes and an hour — and the fee you attach is what decides whether you wait ten minutes or ten hours. Here is exactly what happens at each stage, and what controls the timing. Step 1: Your wallet picks which "bills" to spend Bitcoin does not keep accounts with balances the way a bank does. It keeps UTXOs — unspent transaction outputs . Think of them as individual bills in your wallet. If you received 0.2 BTC once and 0.15 BTC another time, your wallet holds two "bills" totaling 0.35 BTC, not a single balance of 0.35. When you send 0.3 BTC, your wallet must spend whole bills: it uses both UTXOs as inputs and create...