Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Self-dependency transaction question...

From: Matt Whitlock <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2014 16:51:43 -0400

On Sunday, 13 July 2014, at 7:32 pm, Richard Moore wrote:
> P.S. If it is valid, another question; what would happen if a transaction was self-referencing? I realize it would be very difficult to find one, but if I could find a transaction X whose input was X and had an output Y, would Y be a new valid utxo, without being a generation transaction input?

Even if you could find such a transaction that contained its own digest, and even if such a transaction were valid, it still couldn't conjure new coins into existence. The sum of the outputs must be less than or equal to the sum of the inputs (except in the case of a coinbase transaction). If a transaction were to spend its own output, then the input would be completely used up by the output, leaving no balance for a second output.