- Describe what Unspent Transaction Outputs (UTXO) are.
UTXO’s are the incoming transactions to a bitcoin address that have not yet been spent by the holder of the private keys. It is basically what determines that you have some bitcoin to spend in your wallet.
- What would happen if you don’t have any single UTXO that is large enough to cover for your transaction?
If you have several smaller UTXO’s they can all be put together to cover the transaction. If all the UTXO’s do not add upp to the amount you wish to send then the transaction is not valid and will not be accepted.
- How would a bitcoin wallet specify the transaction fee when creating a transaction?
The transaction fee is implied by taking the difference between the total inputs and outputs.
input - output = fee
In this way the fee does not need to be stored separately but can be calculated at any time.
- How could you use the notion of transaction inputs and outputs to increase privacy in your transaction?
The bitcoin wallet could generate multiple private keys and send bitcoin to and from these addresses, and for an outside observer it would be difficult to tell which address belongs to you or someone else.