Can Cryptocurrency Be Trusted? – Kelvin Rich PhD
Email analogy
If you want to receive Bitcoin you will need a unique personal address, just like an email. Let’s call it your bitcoin address. Just like your email address anyone can see it and anyone can send bitcoins to it.
Now you decide you want to access your bitcoin address to see how many bitcoins you own. If you want to read your emails, you would go to your email program like, Gmail, or Outlook. The same type programs exist for bitcoin and the technical name for them is a bitcoin client. In the cryptocurrency world, they call this a wallet.
Think of a client like an online bank account. To access your bitcoins, you need to log into your client to access the information in your account. Again, a loose approximation. For your email client, you would enter your email address and your password. When accessing your bitcoin client or wallet you will need your bitcoin address, called a “public key” and your password, called a “private key.” Allow me to restate this another way for clarities sake.
Your bitcoin “public key” is like your email address and the “private key” is like the password to your email ac- count. It’s crucial that you keep the combination of your public key and private key safe. Exactly like you would guard your email address and password. Some people write it down on a piece of paper and hide it away and other will put it in an encrypted file on their computer.
There are also dedicated websites that will hold your public and private keys for you. If you ever lose your private key you will never be able to get into your wallet again. Unlike email clients no one, and I mean no one can reset your password or private key to your wallet. That currency locked in your bitcoin wallet is lost forever! Because of a public and private key based system there is great privacy within the cryptocurrency world. The mathematical algorithms have been described as unhackable.
Computer hackers can figure out passwords by using software that systematically try combinations of letters and numbers until they find the right combinations. With enough computing power that can run day and night it’s only a matter of time to crack ANY digital password.
The reason the cryptocurrency systems are unhackable is that computer scientist have determined and agree that the cryptocurrency mathematical keys are so complicated that it would take one hundred thousand supercomputers literally trillions of years to try every possible combination of numbers that would figure out a single message protected with 256 bit encryption (technical stuff like how the internet works).
The way cryptocurrencies work the records are encrypted with public and private keys over millions of nodes or computers. Because the information is decentralized no one computer has the entire message.
Thieves would have to hack into millions of computers and steal everyone’s private key all at once. The only way to get your information is for someone to know your specific private key. That means you need to keep it protected.
Published at Sun, 05 Jan 2020 00:06:18 +0000
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