- Describe what Unspent Transaction Outputs (UTXO) are.
UTXO’s are the result of previous inputs from transactions to a wallet. The sum of the UTXO’s in that wallet is the amount that can now be spent.
- What would happen if you don’t have any single UTXO that is large enough to cover for your transaction?
Your transaction would not be approved and would not be added to the blockchain. Instead you would need another, or even multiple UTXO to cover the total cost of the transaction. Any remaining amount is sent back to you.
- How would a bitcoin wallet specify the transaction fee when creating a transaction?
The transaction fee would be implied based on the total of the inputs and outputs. Inputs are always equal to outputs plus the transaction fee. So the fee would be the result of the inputs minus the outputs. Wallets can automatically generate a fee that would help process the transaction in a reasonable amount of time. However, fees can be adjusted to speed up or slow down transactions. (Higher fee, faster transaction / Lower fee, slower transaction)
- How could you use the notion of transaction inputs and outputs to increase privacy in your transaction?
You could create many outputs and split up the amount of BTC sent to each one. You could have fractions of the transaction sent back to yourself or to different wallets that you own to increase privacy. From the outside, it is too difficult to tell how much BTC was sent to uniquely owned addresses and how much was sent back to yourself.