Making payments in a cryptocurrency environment is somewhat different from a regular bank payment.
Payments are made in the system as follows (a large part of the process goes to the user in the background, hidden):
- The owner of the money draws up and signs the transaction via the wallet and using the public key infrastructure.
- Each transaction is sent for processing to all miners, ie computers connected to the system.
- The transactions are consolidated into a single block and checked against a public accounting record.
- To validate a transaction block, all computers connected to the system begin to solve a math problem to find the transaction block confirmation . The first to find the right solution will pay 12.5 bitcoin in the current cycle .
- When a solution is found, the approved block is sent to all miners for further inspection.
- Other miners will accept the block if all the transactions in it are correct and these bitcoins have not been spent elsewhere.
- If more than 50% of the miners have accepted a particular block, the entire network agrees that it is the correct block.
- Once accepted, the block following the sequence in question will be calculated using the full set of information (ie taking into account any previous transactions with bitcoins ) that have occurred with the sequence of blocks. The addition of each subsequent block can be taken as an additional confirmation of the payment transaction.
If two blocks (a sequence of equal length) are sent for inspection at the same time, the miner will begin to check who arrived first, but a parallel sequence will be saved just in case. Finally, the sequence to which the next block is added and which is also the longest is considered correct.
The payment speed is about 10 minutes, ie the time taken to solve the mathematical problem required to confirm the block. Each additional block will re-verify the payment and the payment can no longer be revoked .
Since the transaction is considered to be confirmed with sufficient reliability if it is at a depth of 6 blocks, the 10-minute rule ensures a reliable confirmation in about 1 hour. However, a party to a transaction may still accept the transaction after the transaction block to which the specific transaction belongs and not wait for further confirmations.
The algorithm also predicts which transactions have a higher priority and which should be included in the transaction blocks on a priority basis. For example, transactions with higher amounts and transactions with bitcoins that have not been traded for a long time have a higher priority. Small, non-commissioned transactions can take a long time to be blocked. In addition, a rule has been added allowing miners to select transaction priorities according to the amount of the transaction fee.
To make payments, it is wise to choose a wallet according to the platform you are using.