Bitcoin Unspent Outputs

Unspent outputs Explained

The unspent outputs chart shows the number of unspent transaction outputs per year since genesis block. Every Bitcoin transaction has two elements: inputs and outputs. Inputs show which address a payment is coming from. Outputs show which address it goes to. For instance, let’s say you have a wallet with two bitcoins in it, and you want to send one bitcoin to your friend. Your wallet will completely drain itself of the two bitcoins and send 1 to your friend and one to another wallet you own. Your wallets address will be the input, and your new wallet and our friend’s wallet will be the outputs. As long as you and/or your friend do not move those bitcoins, there will be two more UTXOs on the network. Monitoring how many UTXOs there are tells us a lot about how many people are potentially holding bitcoin and for how long. You will also notice a separate bar for Coinbase UTXOs. These have nothing to do with the popular Coinbase Exchange. Coinbase UTXOs are the ones generated when miners unlock new coins through their mining activities. A UTXO from the Coinbase means that a miner has won a block but has not moved the coins they earned. The Unspent outputs chart is similar to the dormant coins chart except that, instead of showing how many total unspent bitcoins there are, we can look at how many addresses are holding these unspent bitcoins. To understand better, think of wallets as buckets of marbles. Each marble represents a bitcoin. The Unspent Outputs chart tells us how many buckets there are. The Dormant Coins chart tells us how many total marbles (bitcoins) are in all of those buckets.

Reasons for UTXOs

A UTXO could indicate that the keys to a wallet are lost so the owner cannot move them.. Another reason for a UTXO is that someone is saving the coins.