What are the Bitcoin Transaction types?

What are the Bitcoin Transaction types?

There are six standard Bitcoin transaction types at the time of writing. The developers behind Bitcoin have been continuously evolving the types of transactions to allow more functionality – the present list may change in the future. There are five standard transactions which are accepted by the standard client – although some miners will accept a non standard transaction for a price. 

The most popular type of transaction is the TX_PUBKEY, or pay to public key transaction – with over 99% of total transaction volume as of 2014.

The % share of this is expected to change as the Bitcoin community introduces wallets and other ancillary services that use the functionality of different transaction types. 

The problem with more complex transaction times is that they occupy more space in the blockchain which leads to issues with the blocksize. A topic that has come to the fore in 2015 as developers and economists try to find a balance between immediacy of transaction confirmation and miners wanting to restrict supply of space. 

For further examples on how a transaction is validated by a node check out our guide on each transaction type and the most common transaction type of Pay-to-Address.