What is change in a Bitcoin payment?
The part of a payment that goes back to the sender, because wallets spend whole pieces of bitcoin, like getting change from a note.
If your wallet holds a 0.1 BTC piece and you pay 0.03 BTC, it spends the whole piece and sends the rest, minus the fee, back to a new address of yours.
A payment can have a recipient output and a change output, but transactions can also pay several recipients, consolidate inputs or create data outputs. Nothing on the blockchainBlockchainBitcoin's shared record of every payment since 2009, stored in blocks that each link to the one before — which is what makes it a chain. labels which output is change.