This is a weird question so bare with me:
Assume I purchased some ETH from Coinbase and want to send it to a private wallet
- This basically means that Coinbase, as a CEX, provided my off-chain Coinbase account some ETH in exchange for Euros. No idea if they actually have sent ETH to an on-chain account with private keys they own or not. The end goal is that they provided some ETH to me and I have control of it
- This also means, in practice, that Coinbase has a (possibly) Geth P2P node running that sends a transaction signal using whatever Gossip protocol Ethereum uses to the Ethereum Mainnet network (i.e., all other Geth P2P nodes)
Let's assume the account Coinbase sent money from is 0xAAA and my private wallet account is 0xBBB
During the transaction, they asked "which network to use?". This is the confusing part for me: the Ethereum network is a collection of P2P nodes (most probably running Geth) that run the EVM and advance the state based on a consensus protocol. This means that for all Geth P2P nodes now have a new pending transaction (sending ETH from 0xAAA to 0xBBB) that needs to be put into a block by a validator chosen from the consensus algorithm.
The confusing part to me is this: how are different networks capable of understanding this? How can I send money to Polygon or Avalanche as well as Ethereum Mainnet?
The way I think this happens (and here's where I need clarification) is that there are P2P clients (running maybe Geth on Polygon/Avalanche or some other P2P software that Polygon uses) that also listen for Gossip signals and are willing to add that transaction to their network (e.g., Polygon/Avalanche/whatever). This basically means that those nodes have a different "Blockchain" for each network locally and they work with multiple networks simultaneously, right?
Did I get that right? That means that my account history on each network is naturally different. My question is really just about the technical aspects of this.
Feel free to edit the post to make it use the proper terms and many thanks in advance for reading through this