Learning objectives

After this chapter, you should be able to:

• Distinguish economic ownership, legal rights, signing authority and a provider's account records.

• Explain private keys, public keys, addresses, recovery material and wallet software without conflating them.

• Reconcile a Bitcoin transaction using unspent outputs and an Ethereum transaction using account state.

• Identify the network, asset and recipient information required for a complete transfer instruction.

• Distinguish a transfer from an approval, a signed message and a delegated permission.

• Interpret pending, replaced, reverted, confirmed, finalised and credited statuses.

• Calculate network fees and separate them from service-provider charges.

• Diagnose an unsuccessful or misdirected transfer at the correct stage.