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The UTXO of a coinbase transaction has the special condition that it cannot be spent (used as an input) for at least 100 blocks. This temporarily prevents a miner from spending the transaction fees and block reward from a block that may later be determined to be stale (and therefore the coinbase transaction destroyed) after a block chain fork.
This waiting period helps ensure that the block containing the coinbase transaction is not part of an orphaned branch.
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Oh, so this is why mining pools don’t consider blocks mined as fully verified until 100 blocks later? Interesting
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Sorry for the silly question. But how is a "coinbase transaction" different from a regular on-chain transaction? Are they specifically transactions done by miners?
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While not well known, the popular Crypto Exchange Coinbase was actually named after the Coinbase transaction. This is a special transaction in each new block that details where the newly minted bitcoins are to be sent.
When Bitcoin Miners successfully mine a new block, they’re rewarded with the block subsidy. These newly minted bitcoins are the first transaction in each block and have no “input” to them as shown in this example Coinbase transaction from block 796,992.
Every UTXO, if traced back through enough transactions, can be tracked back to its original Coinbase transaction. Currently the block subsidy is 6.25 BTC, however after the next Bitcoin Halving it will be reduced to 3.125 BTC. The reason this Coinbase transaction has a UTXO of 6.63215949 BTC is because 6.25 BTC is for the block subsidy and the rest (0.38215949 BTC) is from all the fees in each transaction inside the block.
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I believe it’s basically the transaction in which new Bitcoin is released into the world aka mined
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You must be kidding
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i would say the nodes enforcing this rule have so much power :)
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