Dive into Blockchain
When the topic of blockchain technology comes up, it is very likely that the first thing your mind would jump to is Bitcoin and it’s wild gyrations on the market over the last few years.
I had bought some Bitcoin just to have the experience of buying some and performing some transfers to understand how it all works. For you my lucky readers, you will be able to satisfy your Bitcoin curiosity vicariously through me.
Now the story begins…
My wife and I use a password manager called Keepass that runs on a Windows, and MacOS using mono.
For Android, there is an excellent called KeePass2Android is an excellent password manager that is fully compatible with KeePass. It also supports a dropbox integration which makes it slick for integrating with the desktop versions of Keepass.
I wanted to send a donation to support the development of Keepass2Android because it is so awesome! I found out that the author has a bitcoin address to receive donations. The wallet address is like an email address or postal address.
Philipp Crocoll lists his bitcoin wallet as 1E4gY27TL7utg1XcNNeGRiyiaRQ4p33LB4 on his website
So I went on to my coinbase account
Coinbase new account Trade $100US Get 10 USD Referral Code terms and conditions
and sent a whopping donation of 0.0025 BTC which when I sent it on 2017-01-31 was worth $2.39 US. Today the value of the donation is $25.08 US, which is not too shabby. I wish I bought more back then :(.
The really interesting thing about the blockchain is that it is a publicly distributed ledger where everything that happens is out in the open forever archived.
So “what happens in blockchain stays in blockchain” except that everybody can see what happens in blockchain.
To demonstrate the power of a distributed block chain, I wanted to find my transaction in the blockchain to see all of the details about it.
There was surprisingly little information in the Coinbase records, other than the destination address and a timestamp.
With a little sleuthing, My Bitcoin transaction hash address is 8738dfc92cf37996dc319a36eeae9891381d927da94796661643f32ce6c42d
I will share some different links for you to see:
From looking at the websites, you will see that my donation was swept up on 2019-02-15 with presumably other donations to the same address with a value of $9.01 US when 1 BTC was worth $3604.31.
I hope that this satisfied some of your curiosity around how the blockchain works.
In my next blockchain post, I am going to switch over to another blockchain called Bitcoin SV and cause trouble by leaving behind some “crypto-graffiti”.