7.3 Let's Go on a Cryptocurrency Field Trip - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

Right now, we're going to go on a cryptocurrency field trip to put together many of the elements we have seen. What you're seeing right now is a stream of unconfirmed transactions making their way into the Bitcoin network. This is actually a very, very interesting page, because it reflects what's known as the memory pool or the mempool. You're seeing right now the mempool that's being gathered by blockchain.com. You see all the miners have different versions of the memory pool. That is all the unconfirmed transactions that are out in the network. So when miners are assembling new blocks, they're basically all dipping into this pool of unconfirmed transactions on the Bitcoin network. When miners are creating new blocks, they're putting together different assemblies of different transactions to build into a new block. And it makes sense. Think about it. This is a decentralized network. So you have some miners that may be in Asia, you may have some miners that may be in North America, you may have some miners that are in South America. The point is this, it's a decentralized network and there are miners all over the world. So the point is you receive certain transactions faster than other networks. As a result, if you're somebody that's an Asia and you're building blocks over there, you probably will receive Asia-based unconfirmed transactions faster than somebody, for example, in North America. But right now we're looking at one of these memory pools. We're looking at the Blockchain, that calm memory pool, and you're looking at all the unconfirmed transactions making their way into the Bitcoin network. This is a great, great page. Because not only are you seeing all these unconfirmed transactions which take place 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you're seeing the fast flow of all these transactions. And if you look through them all of these transactions, some are three Bitcoins, someone were two Bitcoins, some of them are 10 Bitcoins. Sometimes I've seen hundreds of Bitcoins and this the 34 Bitcoins right now. It's just a massive number of Bitcoins making their way all day long nonstop. Now what's cool about this page also is that if you stay here looking long enough you will see as a new block is created. Right now, you're seeing 72,698 unconfirmed transactions. At some point, a new block will be created and that number will drop. Might drop by a thousand transactions or 2000 transactions. The point is, what you're seeing is all the unconfirmed transactions right now waiting in the memory pool and from there, different miners will gather together different transactions to assemble into blocks with the goal of eventually adding that block into the Bitcoin blockchain. So as we go on with this field trip, let's leave this unconfirmed transaction stream coming in and let's start going to other tabs so I can show you some things. Right now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take you to blockchain.info, which will resolve to this Block Explorer. A Block Explorer is a tool online that lets you look at a blockchain. In this case, we're going to look at theblockchain.com Block Explorer, which you can typically find at blockchain.info or in this case you see blockchain.com/explorer Now this Block Explorer is only one Block Explorer and there are many others. We're actually going use another one shortly. But what I want to tell you is that, they're all looking at the same exact Blockchain. Cool thing about this specific Block Explorer is that, blockchain.info also shares with you a lot of information you may be interested in. For instance, it keeps track of right now, the average price and this is the price of Bitcoin across major exchanges. You see, the price of Bitcoin is not set exclusively once. You actually have different prices of Bitcoin depending on which exchange you're dealing with. Different countries price Bitcoin differently. So this is actually a running average of the market price of Bitcoin across major exchanges. And this will vary as the price of Bitcoin goes up and goes down. You'll also see the hash rate and this is the computing power of the miners all over the Bitcoin network. So this is a measurement of the network's processing power. You'll see the difficulty level. This is what determines how easy or how hard it is to mine a new block to add to the Bitcoin blockchain. The difficulty level varies. And the key thing has that Bitcoin keeps a running track of how quickly you can create new blocks to add to the blockchain. So if the miners are able to create blocks on average every 10 minutes, nothing happens. But if they're taking longer, the difficulty level will drop to make it easier for the miners to create blocks, and fit that 10 minute average. On the other hand, if the miners are actually being able to successfully create blocks faster than an average every 10 minutes, the difficulty level will go up. And that difficulty level will tell you dramatically whether it will actually be harder to find those blocks or not. This is a dynamic number that difficulty level goes up and down. So it doesn't mean that it's always going to go up. Sometimes it actually goes down. If there's, for example, when the Bitcoin price dropped, some of the miners actually pulled out and started mining other cryptocurrencies. As a result, the difficulty level had to drop. Because the miners that were left behind were taking too long to my new blocks. That's a big one. Here you see the transactions per day. This is very valuable information. Right now you're seeing we're doing 368,901 transactions per day going in. Now you can see also the average value per transaction, the unconfirmed. Here's that mempool that I told you about, the size of the memory pool. But here's what's interesting. These are the latest blocks added to the Bitcoin blockchain. So you see right now, as of the time of this recording, we're in block number 576,336, which has 3,324 transactions. You can see this one was the previous one, 576,335. And this was actually mined by Antpool. I told you about the mining pools, this is one of those pools. F2pool is another mining pool. You see, these are aggregates of lots of miners getting together, pooling their resources and when Antpool, for instance wins, they distribute the reward among all the miners that are part of that pool. And you'll see here, the different blocks. Let's actually go to a specific transaction because I want to show you something here that's interesting. If I actually go, and this is the blockchain.com/explore, I looked up a specific transaction in here, so I could show you something. This is one transaction I want to show you because all of the transactions on Bitcoin are actually visible. This transaction was actually created on December 29th, 2017. And if you look inside it, I hid a message, "We are changing the world one blockchain at a time." This is another block that I actually included one of my transactions inside and in that transaction, I hid that message. And I'm not saying this just to show off, which is actually pretty cool, you should try it yourself sometime, but the point is, rather than get a tattoo, might as well get a permanent recording on the Bitcoin blockchain. You can do that. I'm going to show you some other things that are recorded permanently in the Bitcoin blockchain. So right now I'm going to take you to this specific transaction. This is a different Block Explorer. Notice this is btc.com. btc.com is another Block Explorer. This transaction is actually holding a very special place in the world of Bitcoin. Because it actually is the historic transaction for what's known as pizza day. Pizza day is celebrated every single year in the Bitcoin world on May 22nd. May 22nd, 2010, what it constituted was Laszlo Hanyecz, which is developer, was hungry and he wanted some pizza. So he basically posted on a Bitcoin forum. He said, "I want to get some pizza. "Will somebody sell me pizza for Bitcoins?" Prior to this specific transaction, nobody had ever paid for anything in Bitcoin. So this officially became the first retail purchase using Bitcoin. You paid and bought for two pizzas, which are worth $25 net. Well, at the time there were $25. Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 Bitcoins. Now mind you, 10,000 Bitcoins today, is a massive amount of money. But back then it was worth nothing. Because there was really no value for what a Bitcoin was worth. This effectively pegged the price of a Bitcoin for that transaction at a quarter of a penny. That is you needed four Bitcoins for every 1 cent. Now here's, what's interesting about the whole thing. If you look at today, as we saw the average price of a Bitcoin is $8,063.90. Every one of those Bitcoins that was worth a quarter of a penny today is worth 8,063 and 90 cents. So that is a massive, massive transaction for two pizzas. But historically this is a very important transaction and here it is permanent and immutable forever to be there. Now I want to do something that's interesting. I'm going to actually take you into a Block Explorer for Ethereum. You see Bitcoin is a public blockchain, so you can see all the transactions. But so is Ethereum. So right now, what you're seeing here is a Block Explorer for Ethereum. It's actually called etherscan.io. And I looked up specifically this transaction to show you something in the Ethereum blockchain. So in this transaction which you see here, you see a lot of numbers. You see this transaction. But what you don't know is that hidden inside this transaction, I can convert it into text. And this is actually the full text for the Panmunjom Declaration, which was a declaration of peace between North and South Korea. And this was actually hidden inside by an Ethereum developer. He recorded the entire transaction permanently immutably on the Ethereum blockchain. Now, the reason why I'm sharing all of these things with you is because all of these things are available for you to view. So if you really want to look at what's going on in Bitcoin, you can basically look at these unconfirmed transactions and you can see how all these transactions go through. There's really nothing to hide there in there. In fact, if you sit here long enough and you're actually in your home and you actually have your volume up, you can actually hear whenever a new block of transactions is created. It will make a noise, like a cash register. And what's interesting is that you will then see here, you'll see that a new transaction is added to the Bitcoin blockchain. Let me take you back to coinmarketcap.com which we covered earlier in this course. The reason why I want to do that is we're doing a field trip today. And this field trip is as of this precise moment in time. And what you'll notice if you go to coinmarketcap.com as of this moment, is that the number of cryptocurrencies has actually increased. The last time we were here, we were at 2,177. Now we're at 2,179. Also the market keeps moving and prices change. You'll notice that the price of Bitcoin has also changed. This is a very valuable site because it's constantly updated. And as the market keeps growing and more cryptocurrencies are created or are eliminated, it all gets reflected here as well as the pricing for all of them. Now, I can't end this field trip without actually taking you to see my dear crypto Katy Satoshi, Catamoto. Let's go there. This is Satoshi Catamoto. I told you, so he's there. And if you ever want to visit it, you can see that my CryptoKitty Satoshi is there. Here's the owner, that's me. I actually, if I drill down into that, I'm going to go even further. You're going to see all of my kitties right now. And if you look at some of my other kitties, I've got to Sea Kitty, I've got My Precious "OBCAAT". This is actually one blockchain at a time. "You can call me Hal," this is actually named after Hal Finney. Which was actually a very important cryptographer and developer that's part of the history of Bitcoin. Hal actually died. And this is actually just a tribute to Hal. So, "You can call me Hal." And there's Mr Baby Moustache, Satoshi Catamoto, but all of these are CryptoKitties that I own. As a matter of fact, I've actually had some of these which actually were spawned by actually having my kitties be with other kitties and here a new kitties to come along. The point is these are all digital assets that I own and they're all available for you to see. Just along like you can go to every single transaction and see everything that's going on in the blockchain, by merely taking your own field trip. Enjoy.