Verifying a Transaction! (exact same can be done with ALL crypto-curriencies using the blockchain technology)
lets imagine you trade with someone something. They send, or you, some funds. How to verify if this is true? Well if you get the fund in your wallet, then that is proof enough. If you send and someone says "Oh, I didnt get anything" ... then this is how YOU verify the truth.
Using the Blockchain Explorer!!
As it records everything, you can copy/paste either a wallet address and check ALL the transactions from that address, or copy/paste a specific transaction between two addresses (or more) that occurred.
Lets imagine we dont believe MikeyB420 actually did send AFN some funds... We could track him down since I sent funds to him. Just explore the blockchain following the money. Since I know he owns that address (anonymity 101), I can link that specific POT address to his forum identity. If you go shopping in Amazon with Bitcoin, they can track your REAL identity... If you dont give your identity out, no-one can. But all transactions CAN be back-traced! So if you really need anonymity, be very very careful about back-tracked transactions!
Anyways, he said he sent 10 POTs to AFN and pasted this tx ID : 6ff1c53462b67830b98f1042478167019504b4901d423b3d0665f4340a035d4a
So we copy that and head over to the Potcoin Block Explorer and paste it there. I put up a link before, you can use different ones, just make sure they are Potcoin Explorers and not some other coin. Its open-source, so anyone can make block explorers.
http://www.potchain.net/ I also really like
https://chainz.cryptoid.info/ so I'll be using this one this time.
Paste the tx id into the search field ;
No matching records found !??! wtf?? ...
the blockchain does not find the tx... hmmm ...That is indeed very very odd... Mikey, playing any funny games? trying to pull a fast one on us? (accusing is a very bad thing, you're innocent until proven guilty, so lets investigate a little further!)
Ok then, lets verify AFN's addy to see if it got a 10 POT payment... I copy the AFN's addy and paste into the block explorer...
Yes!! there is a +10 POT deposit made on the 29th of Nov 2014 at 12:46pm ... and the tx id (also called tx hash) looks very similar to Mikey's tx ID... so this is indeed very weird. Lets click on it to find all the info we can from that specific tx.
Ok, here we the details on that +10 transaction.
DONT get freaked out! Its really simple. You have Inputs and Outputs. Inputs is where the funds comes from, Output is where is goes. So in this transaction, we can perfectly see that in Inputs we do have as origin Mikey's address
PD3PoqD2XSY7XKP7TiDuvePKfvbMcE81CF containing 100 POTS (red lines) ... He didn in fact send +10 POTs to AFN's address, getting back +90 POTs though what's called a "change address" back into his wallet.
[TABLE="class: table table-condensed"]
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[TD][/TD]
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So yes, Mikey not a scammer and did indeed send +10 POTs to AFN. You can see AFN's address in the same line as the 10 POTs. The 90 POT change goes back to the wallet.
... then why the hell didn't the tx ID work?
If you look closely, Mikey pasted the tx ID but somewhere along the line managed to put a space in the middle.
So if we remove that space and try the Block Explorer again with 6ff1c53462b67830b98f1042478167019504b4901d423b3d0665f4340a035d4a
you will be able to perfectly verify that the transaction is valid and is exactly as Mikey said
This is the beauty of crypto-currency. You cannot lie about it. No one can fool you. No one can charge-back. No one can create fake money (fractional-reserve banking). All in all it will promote a truer more honest future when dealing with money.