When you are going to send bitcoin to someone, you need to get an address from them. You will also need to know how much to send. Lastly, you will need to decide how quickly you want your transaction confirmed.
Each wallet will then do the work to pass your transaction on to all the other bitcoin computers. Remember from part 5, some of these computers are working to add your transaction into the next block. Bitcoin miners are the people running these computers earning bitcoin based on the speed of their computers. When you decided how quickly you wanted your transaction confirmed, the wallet software decided how much fees to pay for the transaction. There is only so much space in each block and so if you want your transaction confirmed ASAP you will need to pay a higher fee.
Once your wallet passes your transaction, it will appear in the mempool. Short for memory pool, mempool is the full list of all waiting transactions. Free access to look up transactions in the mempool is available at mempool.space
Once a bitcoin miner adds a block to the blockchain with your transaction included, it will have one confirmation.
Lastly, your wallet will notify you that your transaction has been confirmed. And your balance should be decreased.
In part 9 we will discuss the eight digits in each bitcoin.
