Re: How to determine the antiquity of my coins?

Quote from: Delek on October 20, 2015, 07:58:44 PM

Hi there Bitcoin Society!

I was wondering when my Bitcoins were born, in which block height my coins were actually mined. There is a magical thing in think that maybe you have some Satoshis built in the first mountains of the Bitcoin blockchain.

There's no web-service/app for this? The idea is to search for a public address and obtain a detailed tree of coins movements up to the Coinbase.

You can follow a transaction chain back in time to its origin, but the coins you currently hold in your wallet either do not exist at all or were created when you received the transaction for them. Depends on your interpretation Wink

Maybe a few examples can help.

Lets say you have received 1 BTC from A and 1 BTC from B. Your balance is 2 BTC.

If you want to spend 0.5 BTC you either use the coins you received from A the coins you received from B or both.

Lets assume you use the coins from A (or B). You send 0.5 to someone else and 0.5 (no fee for simplicity) back to yourself. These 0.5 you send back to yourself (called change) did not exist before. You just created them with your transaction. You can clearly say them came from A though.

Lets assume you use both coins from A and B. You send 1 BTC to someone else and 1 BTC back to yourself. Its impossible to say which coins come from A and which from B. You can follow both paths back and will probably find several coinbases where the coins originally came from.

Alternativly you can see bitcoin as a long chain of transactions (starting with the 1st coinbase transaction in each block) that can be referenced to create new transactions. This is closer to how bitcoin actually works, but more difficult to grasp for us humans. In this interpretation there are no coins[1].

[1] Feel free to use the "there is no spoon" kid voice in your head.