What happens between submitting a transaction to the network and it being confirmed?

I am very new to bitcoin, appreciate any help that I can get for below queries. 1) Is there any way (site or app) to know, to which node my current (latest) transaction is headed to? Does it go to one node or many before included into block? Probably it is going to the pool, where it will be picked to included in the block. So do we know which pool it landed in?

2) How to know, how many miner are currently working with my latest transaction, which is yet to be included into the block? Here is my understanding, more than one miner can include one transaction and all may not have same transactions. So how to know who all are working on this

Kind Regards

user1687711

Posted 2016-12-31T23:09:48.270

Reputation: 13

Answers

Some miner will mine the next block. No one knows which one it will be. For transactions to be included in a block within a reasonable period of time, pretty much all miners have to know about pretty much all transactions.

You don't know who is currently mining and maybe you're on a bad internet connection so you don't want to send your transaction to every single miner in the world, just in case that is the one who will build the next block. You merely have to send your transaction to a single node in the Bitcoin network. If it's valid and contains a reasonable fee, it'll be automatically propagated through the network and find its way to all miners.

So to answer your first quesiton: It didn't just go to a single miner. You can be pretty sure all miners know about it.

Miners don't tell others which transactions they are trying to get into the next block. This changes with really, really often, for every big miner. They by the way are working on many blocks at the same time, hoping to succeed with one.

Once a transaction has been included in a block, you can find out who made that block. Let's say your transaction ID is ccb5133b45fbca133936ab059377d4a5e4078a48b98349c8beb99c2cee529716. Head over to https://blockchain.info and enter it. You'll be shown that it's included in block 446059 ("Included In Blocks"). Click on that number and you'll be shown that block. There is a field called "Relayed By" whose value in this case is "BitFury". So you know the block was probably made by BitFury.

UTF-8

Posted 2016-12-31T23:09:48.270

Reputation: 2 941

1Thanks UTF-8, few follow up questions, if I can ask, apologies for ignorance on this topic 1) Can I send the tx to a particular node or it will just send & software will direct to nearest node 2) My understanding is each node may not mine, the question is whether miner are separate nodes or an ordinary node can be miner node too 3) Is there a pool where miner look for transaction, how exactly a transaction reaches there?. Appreciate if you can help me with these. – user1687711 – 2017-01-01T06:28:20.953

Whether you can send your transaction to a particular node depends on the wallet software you use. Some give you the choice, some don't. Each miner is a node but not each node is a miner. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Full_node Nodes communicate with one another. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Network They keep their own pools. https://99bitcoins.com/what-is-bitcoin-mempool/ If one of their peers sent them new data, they tell their other peers about it. That's how information spreads through the network. Each node decides what's in its pool and what is sent to others.

– UTF-8 – 2017-01-01T06:53:02.527

Thanks UTF-8, so If I use wallet from mycelium, would that be classified as lightweight node? Appreciate all help. – user1687711 – 2017-01-01T08:09:51.133

Yes, it's a lightweight node. – UTF-8 – 2017-01-01T08:49:03.307

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network, so you're not sending your transaction to a miner specifically, but to some random peers. They in turn send it to other peers and so forth, until it goes through the entire network. Some of these peers will be miners who may attempt to add your transaction to a block.

In more detail, if you are running the Bitcoin client software, your computer talks to several peers, essentially randomly selected. Your computer asks them for new blocks, transactions, updated peer list, etc using a simple protocol over port 8333. Meanwhile, other random computers can ask your client for new blocks, transactions, etc. So you are helping spread other transactions through the system.

One of the key ideas of Bitcoin is this decentralized structure - there's no node in charge. You pass your new transaction to a few random nodes and a few seconds later it has been passed to just about everyone on the network, including the miners.

The network is dynamic since peers can go up and down all the time. Your client will switch to different peers if one stops responding to you. And other peers will rapidly find out about you when you join the network.

(Lightweight clients don't take part in this full network, since you wouldn't want all this traffic to your phone for instance.)

Ken Shirriff

Posted 2016-12-31T23:09:48.270

Reputation: 231