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Bitcoin [BTC] proponent Andreas Antonopoulos elucidates on Unspent Transaction Outputs [UTXO]

source-logo  ambcrypto.com 26 April 2019 19:50, UTC

Andreas Antonopoulos, author of Mastering Bitcoin and an influencer, spoke about UTXOs, and where they were stored, during a Q&A session on Bitcoin.

To the question of what UTXO was, Andreas stated that they referred to Unspent Transaction Outputs and added that they were in the blockchain. He further stated that every transaction has its own transaction output, elaborating that if a user had a copy of the blockchain with the transactions in it, then the transaction outputs would be in that database.

Andreas added,

“[…] they’re not in an easy-to-find database because they’re just in the transactions so unless you know the transaction ID, so you can look up a transaction and then find the outputs that transaction has, those outputs are sitting in the blockchain […]”

This was followed by the author explaining the result of a scenario where a user creates a transaction index and adds it to the watch address. The user’s node software, such as Bitcoin Core, would create a separate index for the database, wallet index, which would index all the UTXO by a script corresponding to the addresses in the watch list.

Andreas further stated that it would have the same database, but would be indexed by the UTXO by script entry, allowing the user to quickly access all the UTXO at that point in time to a specific address. He went on to state,

“But Bitcoin core only does that for specific addresses that you tell it to watch it does not build that index for everything. so the UTXO’s are stored in the blockchain without being fully indexed and they’re only fully indexed when you tell Bitcoin Core to watch specific addresses “

The Bitcoin proponent also explained a scenario where it would be used to build block explorers that enable users to search and find address balances. He stated that here, they were building a fully indexed database of all the UTXOs and all the addresses, which would always be updated. He added that it would require a large amount of disk space and would be a complex database. He added,

“So they store of full UTXO set indexed by a number of different indices, so they can look these things up very very quickly and present them on your screen and that’s custom software that they built to do this your wallet doesn’t do this. so the UTXO is stored where it’s needed, when it’s needed, for the purposes that it’s needed.”

ambcrypto.com