With the little knowledge I have, In this post I will be explaining how cryptocurrency wallet works.
IMAGE SOURCE: pixabay
During my previous post I mentioned cryptocurrency wallet as a software technology.
First of all it doesn't matter which cryptocurrency we talk about, has each coin had its own official release of wallet. For example dogecoin has a dogecoin wallet, hive as an hive wallet, Bitcoin had a Bitcoin wallet and so on.
There are also third parties wallet, owned by other companies, they can be any sort of wallet which can be named of their choice, other than the actual cryptocurrencies wallet. Third Party wallet are breddwallet, jaxx and so on.
But for now all we need to know is the functions of the public and private key. I will make an email for example instead of using general wallet. Don't worry I will specify using a Bitcoin wallet. For example you have an email address which you can use to send or receive emails to and from. This email would represent our public key of your Bitcoin wallet.
Bitcoin public keys can be provide to anyone , when you wish to receive or send a payment they will see your public keys when they have received the funds. Your public key can be online , you can show it to anyone, similarly to email address it comes to email, when it comes to Bitcoin address, they are 34 of random character, it consists of random digit of upper and lower case.BITCOIN address are always starting with 1 and it never consist of upper case of O or a number 0,this is for preventing the management of the address.
test copied from Bitcoin terminologies
I know you are confused. Back to the email analogy, when you want to login to your mail you must have a password, but in the case of Bitcoin , you will require a private key or a password in other to have access to the wallet.
IMAGE SOURCE: pixabay
Your private key must be secured, you should never show it to the third party or give it to anyone, your private key is stored in your wallet which allows you to have access to your funds.
Your Bitcoin private address will generate automatically when you install your wallet and received a public address. Your private key is linked with the public key, which you can generate your own password, you must remember you backup your private key and keep it safe and secured.
I would advice you not to put that on your laptop or phones so that others won't have access to it, the best thing you need to do is to write it down and keep it safe.
If you have your wallet on your computer and your computer got broken or hacked,using your private key you can generate your public key and have access to your wallet once again on other computer or phones.
Thanks for the time you dedicated to read this