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What I would like to find out is whether for a specific time in the past, we can know the number of BTC that exist today and were bought at this time. The discrete time can be the time of block generation, i.e. roughly every ten minutes, but also for instance daily time.

What I understand is that on the Blockchain, we do not really keep track of the amount of BTC held by a specific address / account, but rather of the full history of transactions of this account. The sum of the unspent inputs of a specific address, which are basically routed output payments of other addresses, is the number of BTC that this address "holds", or is able to spend.

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This part wasnt displayed in the beginning, due to some formatting error.

Now comes the actual, more refined question. In order to construct the number of BTC that were bought at t[smaller than]T, where T is now, is there a way other than looking at the complete history of transactions on the BTC blockchain, in order to find this number? Sort of a shortcut?

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Thanks, best, JC

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  • I think you're asking if there is a way to figure out the difference between the current UTXO set and a UTXO set from some point in the past, but it would be helpful if you finished/clarified your question and defined t and T.
    – Matthew Cruz
    Jan 14, 2020 at 10:59
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    By "bought at this time" do you mean purchased from an exchange or directly from a private individual. Does "bought" exclude Bitcoin obtained by selling goods or services for BTC? Or do you mean all transaction outputs other than mining rewards and transaction fees?
    – RedGrittyBrick
    Jan 14, 2020 at 11:57
  • Your understanding of how the network keeps track of coins is slightly incorrect: there is no concept of addresses with balances, only UTXOs. Addresses with balances is just a nice human-readable abstraction.
    – chytrik
    Jan 14, 2020 at 23:35

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