Probably the most important aspect for any dev or user
Wallet, public and private key
A crypto wallet...it holds my tokens, yeah? Well……mmmm……well…..
A wallet will let you do many things, such as letting you see how many tokens you have, but it doesn’t actually hold them. Those tokens either live in, or in the case of an NFT have a reference to, a smart contract. But what does live in your crypto wallet are what we call your public and private keys. And it’s the private key that lets you sign messages. If you use internet, you probably use this technology daily, so let’s look at everyday use cases, and then compare that to our wallet scenario.
Just say you want to send a message on a social media platform like Signal or Telegram. You write a message. When you click on Send, your private key in your app encrypts your message, so it becomes a jumble of numbers and letters. Your app broadcasts the message to the network saying “Hey, this is my public key, transfer my message to the app at my friend’s public key!” You friend receives your encrypted message and decrypts it using your public combined with their private key. But how can they do that? Because you both opted in to be in each other’s phone book and therefore the messages you send each other are safe and sealed. And that is how end-to-end, encryption works. Otherwise known as public-private key crytography.
These keys are controlled by your seed phrase. And what you also must do is store that seed phrase in a couple of really safe places offline. That could be on a piece of paper in your house, or even a safety deposit box!! What is a seed phrase, you may ask. It’s cryptography at work, and you are 100% in control of the privacy it gives. No dodgy data server breaches, or hacks, you are in control!
Public private key pairs are hexidecimal (base 16, 0-f) numbers. They encrypt and decrypt messages, often in crypto that means transactions, and we use them to sign these transactions. And we are going to explain them using an analogy with a lock box whose lock has three positions, a message in the box, and a couple of keys.
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