Keys and Addresses

Now that we've covered the basics of public and private keys, let's dive in a bit deeper and take a look at how Bitcoin generates these keys.

Keys and Addresses

You may have heard that bitcoin is based on cryptography, which is a branch of mathematics used extensively in computer security. Cryptography means "secret writing" in Greek, but the science of cryptography encompasses more than just secret writing, which is referred to as encryption. Cryptography can also be used to prove knowledge of a secret without revealing that secret (digital signature), or prove the authenticity of data (digital fingerprint). These types of cryptographic proofs are the mathematical tools critical to bitcoin and used extensively in bitcoin applications. Ironically, encryption is not an important part of bitcoin, as its communications and transaction data are not encrypted and do not need to be encrypted to protect the funds. In this chapter, we will introduce some of the cryptography used in bitcoin to control ownership of funds, in the form of keys, addresses, and wallets.


Source: Andreas M. Antonopoulos, https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook/blob/develop/ch04.asciidoc
Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.