Creating Multiple Transactions


The transactions made by various clients are queued in the system; the miners pick up the transactions from this queue and add it to the block. They will then mine the block and the winning miner would have the privilege of adding the block to the blockchain and thereby earn some money for himself.

We will describe this mining process later when we discuss the creation of the blockchain. Before we write the code for multiple transactions, let us add a small utility function to print the contents of a given transaction.

Displaying Transaction

The display_transaction function accepts a single parameter of transaction type. The dictionary object within the received transaction is copied to a temporary variable called dict and using the dictionary keys, the various values are printed on the console.

def display_transaction(transaction):
   #for transaction in transactions:
   dict = transaction.to_dict()
   print ("sender: " + dict['sender'])
   print ('-----')
   print ("recipient: " + dict['recipient'])
   print ('-----')
   print ("value: " + str(dict['value']))
   print ('-----')
   print ("time: " + str(dict['time']))
   print ('-----')

Next, we define a transaction queue for storing our transaction objects.

Transaction Queue

To create a queue, we declare a global list variable called transactions as follows −

transactions = []

We will simply append each newly created transaction to this queue. Please note that for brevity, we will not implement the queue management logic in this tutorial.

Creating Multiple Clients

Now, we will start creating transactions. First, we will create four clients who will send money to each other for obtaining various services or goods from others.

Dinesh = Client()
Ramesh = Client()
Seema = Client()
Vijay = Client()

At this point, we have four clients called Dinesh, Ramesh, Seema, and Vijay. We currently assume that each of these clients hold some TPCoins in their wallets for transacting. The identity of each of these clients would be specified by using the identity property of these objects.

Creating First Transaction

Now, we initiate our first transaction as follows −

t1 = Transaction(
   Dinesh,
   Ramesh.identity,
   15.0
)

In this transaction Dinesh sends 5 TPCoins to Ramesh. For transaction to be successful, we will have to ensure that Dinesh has sufficient money in his wallet for this payment. Note that, we will need a genesis transaction to start TPCoin circulation in the system. You will write the transaction code for this genesis transaction very shortly as you read along.

We will sign this transaction using Dinesh’s private key and add it to the transaction queue as follows −

t1.sign_transaction()
transactions.append(t1)

After the first transaction made by Dinesh, we will create several more transactions between different clients that we created above.

Adding More Transactions

We will now create several more transactions, each transaction given out a few TPCoins to another party. When somebody spends money, it is not necessary that he has to check for sufficient balances in this wallet. The miner in anyway would be validating each transaction for the balance that the sender has while initiating the transaction.

In case of insufficient balance, the miner will mark this transaction as invalid and would not add it to this block.

The following code creates and adds nine more transactions to our queue.

t2 = Transaction(
   Dinesh,
   Seema.identity,
   6.0
)
t2.sign_transaction()
transactions.append(t2)
t3 = Transaction(
   Ramesh,
   Vijay.identity,
   2.0
)
t3.sign_transaction()
transactions.append(t3)
t4 = Transaction(
   Seema,
   Ramesh.identity,
   4.0
)
t4.sign_transaction()
transactions.append(t4)
t5 = Transaction(
   Vijay,
   Seema.identity,
   7.0
)
t5.sign_transaction()
transactions.append(t5)
t6 = Transaction(
   Ramesh,
   Seema.identity,
   3.0
)
t6.sign_transaction()
transactions.append(t6)
t7 = Transaction(
   Seema,
   Dinesh.identity,
   8.0
)
t7.sign_transaction()
transactions.append(t7)
t8 = Transaction(
   Seema,
   Ramesh.identity,
   1.0
)
t8.sign_transaction()
transactions.append(t8)
t9 = Transaction(
   Vijay,
   Dinesh.identity,
   5.0
)
t9.sign_transaction()
transactions.append(t9)
t10 = Transaction(
   Vijay,
   Ramesh.identity,
   3.0
)
t10.sign_transaction()
transactions.append(t10)

When you run the above code, you will have ten transactions in the queue for the miners to create their blocks.

Dumping Transactions

As a blockchain manager, you may periodically like to review the contents of transaction queue. For this purpose, you can use the display_transaction function that we developed earlier. To dump all transactions in the queue, just iterate the transactions list and for each referenced transaction, call the display_transaction function as shown here −

for transaction in transactions:
   display_transaction (transaction)
   print ('--------------')

The transactions are separated by a dashed line for distinction. If you run the above code, you would see the transaction list as shown below −

sender:
30819f300d06092a864886f70d010101050003818d0030818902818100bb064c99c49214
4a9f463480273aba93ac1db1f0da3cb9f3c1f9d058cf499fd8e54d244da0a8dd6ddd329e
c86794b04d773eb4841c9f935ea4d9ccc2821c7a1082d23b6c928d59863407f52fa05d8b
47e5157f8fe56c2ce3279c657f9c6a80500073b0be8093f748aef667c03e64f04f84d311
c4d866c12d79d3fc3034563dfb0203010001
-----
recipient:
30819f300d06092a864886f70d010101050003818d0030818902818100be93b516b28c6e
674abe7abdb11ce0fdf5bb728b75216b73f37a6432e4b402b3ad8139b8c0ba541a72c8ad
d126b6e1a1308fb98b727beb63c6060356bb177bb7d54b54dbe87aee7353d0a6baa93977
04de625d1836d3f42c7ee5683f6703259592cc24b09699376807f28fe0e00ff882974484
d805f874260dfc2d1627473b910203010001
-----
value: 15.0
-----
time: 2019-01-14 16:18:01.859915
-----
--------------
sender:
30819f300d06092a864886f70d010101050003818d0030818902818100bb064c99c49214
4a9f463480273aba93ac1db1f0da3cb9f3c1f9d058cf499fd8e54d244da0a8dd6ddd329e
c86794b04d773eb4841c9f935ea4d9ccc2821c7a1082d23b6c928d59863407f52fa05d8b
47e5157f8fe56c2ce3279c657f9c6a80500073b0be8093f748aef667c03e64f04f84d311
c4d866c12d79d3fc3034563dfb0203010001
-----
recipient:
30819f300d06092a864886f70d010101050003818d0030818902818100a070c82b34ae14
3cbe59b3a2afde7186e9d5bc274955d8112d87a00256a35369acc4d0edfe65e8f9dc93fb
d9ee74b9e7ea12334da38c8c9900e6ced1c4ce93f86e06611e656521a1eab561892b7db0
961b4f212d1fd5b5e49ae09cf8c603a068f9b723aa8a651032ff6f24e5de00387e4d0623
75799742a359b8f22c5362e5650203010001
-----
value: 6.0
-----
time: 2019-01-14 16:18:01.860966
-----
--------------
sender:
30819f300d06092a864886f70d010101050003818d0030818902818100be93b516b28c6e
674abe7abdb11ce0fdf5bb728b75216b73f37a6432e4b402b3ad8139b8c0ba541a72c8ad
d126b6e1a1308fb98b727beb63c6060356bb177bb7d54b54dbe87aee7353d0a6baa93977
04de625d1836d3f42c7ee5683f6703259592cc24b09699376807f28fe0e00ff882974484
d805f874260dfc2d1627473b910203010001
-----
recipient:
30819f300d06092a864886f70d010101050003818d0030818902818100cba097c0854876
f41338c62598c658f545182cfa4acebce147aedf328181f9c4930f14498fd03c0af6b0cc
e25be99452a81df4fa30a53eddbb7bb7b203adf8764a0ccd9db6913a576d68d642d8fd47
452590137869c25d9ff83d68ebe6d616056a8425b85b52e69715b8b85ae807b84638d8f0
0e321b65e4c33acaf6469e18e30203010001
-----
value: 2.0
-----
time: 2019-01-14 16:18:01.861958
-----
--------------

For brevity, I have printed only first few transactions in the list. In the above code, we print all transactions beginning with the very first transaction except for the genesis transaction which was never added to this list. As the transactions are added to the blocks periodically, you will generally be interested in viewing only the list of transactions which are yet to be mined. In that case, you will need to create an appropriate for loop to iterate through the transactions which are not yet mined.

So far, you have learned how to create clients, allow them to among themselves and maintain a queue of the pending transactions which are to be mined. Now, comes the most important part of this tutorial and that is creating a blockchain itself. You will learn this in the next lesson.

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