Transferring an asset

The ownership of an asset can be proven by possession of the private key for an address (public key) to which the asset belongs. Whenever the ownership of an asset needs to be transferred, users use their private key to sign the transaction, firstly proving their ownership, and from there transferring the ownership to the desired user.

We're now going to look at a detailed example to better explain asset ownership. Alice is a user who claims to own an asset in the blockchain network. She wishes to transfer this asset to her friend, Bob. She has access to her private key, and she uses it to create a transaction with a digital signature, which will prove that she owns the asset. The signing process is performed using the digital signature that is similar to what we used earlier in this chapter when ECDSA was used as a signing algorithm, which also made use of an ECC key pair. The  following Figure 3.3 shows how Alice creates a signature by signing the transaction contents that contain asset transfer information: