Guided walkthrough · 5 minutes
Read a real transaction
The famous 10,000 BTC pizza payment, one field at a time. Scroll — the record on the left lights up as each step explains it.
Step 1 of 7
1 / 7
The hash is the citation
On 22 May 2010, 10,000 BTC bought two pizzas. Everything about that payment lives behind one identifier — the transaction hash. Quote it, and anyone in the world can pull up this exact record, today or in twenty years. No screenshot, no trust in us required.
2 / 7
Two explorers, one record
You never read the blockchain — you read an explorer's rendering of it. So the rule is: never rely on one. This record is identical on mempool.space and Blockchair, which are run by different operators. If they ever disagreed, the drill is to stop, not to pick the convenient number.
3 / 7
131 inputs — a wallet is not an account
The payer's 10,000 BTC didn't sit in a balance. It existed as 131 separate unspent outputs — mining rewards and small receipts — all consumed together in this one payment. That is how Bitcoin records value: a wallet is a collection of spendable pieces, not a number.
4 / 7
One output — and no change
Most Bitcoin payments create two outputs: the payment, plus change back to the payer. This one has exactly one, because the inputs happened to sum to the price. The commonest explorer misreading is calling a change output a second recipient — this transaction is the clean counter-example to memorise.
5 / 7
Block time, not human time
The record says block 57,043, timestamped 18:16:31 UTC. That timestamp was set by the miner, within protocol tolerance — it dates the block, not the moment a person clicked send. Cite it as the block timestamp and the statement stays exactly as strong as the ledger makes it.
6 / 7
Fiat is an annotation, not a fact
Was this a $41 purchase or a $700 million transaction? Both — at different dates. The ledger records 10,000 BTC, full stop. Any fiat figure is true only at a date and a source, so it belongs in an annotation carrying both, never in the factual layer.
7 / 7
The finished citation
Put together, the record reads: transaction a1075db5…d48d, Bitcoin mainnet, block 57,043, 2010-05-22 18:16:31 UTC, 131 inputs, single output of 10,000 BTC — read on mempool.space, corroborated on Blockchair. That sentence survives cross-examination. And it took five minutes.
That's the method. Go deeper, then try it on real cases: