Right, that was my instinct, it is just that the documentation I have seen, including the O'Reilley bitcoin manual, on the coinbase transaction, glosses over th

Right, that was my instinct, it is just that the documentation I have seen, including the O'Reilley bitcoin manual, on the coinbase transaction, glosses over this point. This is the best explanation I've seen so far: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10050/how-balances-are-calculated https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10050/how-balanc...