I have read the whitepaper a few times now, I just want to know precisely what Satoshi meant by 'digitally signing a hash of the previous transaction and the public key of the next owner and adding these to the end of the coin.'
Forget everything you know about Bitcoin, imagine you are reading this for the first time in late 2008 and you have only read the abstract and sections 1&2. Does he mean:
- Get hash of previous transaction, Prev_Hash
- Get public key of whom we are transferring coin to, Pub_Key
- Concatenate these two strings, New_String = concat(Prev_Hash,Pub_Key)
- Digitally sign New_String using whatever algorithm (no mention of specifics in whitepaper)
OR
- Get previous transaction, Prev_Tx
- Get public key of whom we are transferring coin to, Pub_Key
- Concatenate these two strings, New_String = concat(Prev_Tx, Pub_Key)
- Hash New_String, Hashed_New_String
- Digitally sign Hashed_New_String using whatever algorithm
Or any other ways of going about it, such as signing a hash of Prev_Tx, and then Also signing a hash of Pub_key and having 2 signatures.
I want to explore evolution of Bitcoin in a chronological way by trying to put myself in the shoes of the people working on it at the very start and so I want to know what Satoshi really meant. Can't seem to find anything online