Imagine you have a piggy bank, but instead of one big space for all your money, it has little compartments that hold different amounts of money (UTXO). Each time you put money in, you fill one of these compartments. This is kind of like what the UTXO model does with digital money like Bitcoin.
1. What is the UTXO Model?
When you use this digital money to buy something, let’s say a toy, you might not use all the money in one compartment. For example, if you need to pay 50 cents but you have a compartment with 1 dollar, you use that dollar, and then you get 50 cents back as change. This change goes back into a new compartment in your piggy bank. In the UTXO model, every time you spend some of your digital money and don’t use it all, the leftover (or change) is kept track of in these little compartments until you need to use it again.
2. How It Works
So, every time you want to buy something else, the digital money system looks at all the compartments in your piggy bank to see how much money you have and what compartments it can use to pay. Once it uses the money from a compartment, it either empties it (if you spent all the money in it) or puts change back into a new compartment.
3. Goals of the UTXO Model
The main goal of this system is to make sure everyone knows which compartments belong to whom, without actually knowing who the person is. It’s like saying “the person with the red ticket owns these compartments” without saying who the person with the red ticket is. This helps keep things fair and safe, so everyone knows what money they have and can use it without getting mixed up with anyone else’s.
And just like you know how much money you have in your piggy bank, in the UTXO model, everyone can know how much digital money they have and where it is, but they still keep their privacy!
So, think of the UTXO model as a super-smart piggy bank that helps people use their digital money easily and safely, keeping track of all the little bits of money until they need to use them again.
