What the f--k are public and private keys?
If you’re involved in the crypto community and have ever thought about storing your coins in a wallet or even transferring to a different exchange, you’ve probably heard words like 'private key', 'public key' and 'wallet address'. Now that’s great that you’ve heard of them but what do they even mean?
A good way to think about it in a way that relates to your day to day life is your online banking. Your account number is linked to your password. When you go to log into your online banking you enter your account number or your public key. This public key is something that everyone can see, this is a key that identifies you to the rest of the world. Your password is your private key, this is the key that no-one else except for you knows, you use this to access your account.
However, if you’ve ever seen a public and private key in real life you’ll know your public key isn’t just a six-digit number and your private key isn’t abc123, they are a massive, complex line of characters that look like a four-year old got their hand on your work iPad and sent a jumbled message to your boss. These lines are actually very important and quite secure. These cryptographic keys are used within a cryptographic algorithm to encode data. The creation of both a public and a private key allow for a process dubbed asymmetric encryption, this means that one key (the public key) is used to encrypt data (your transaction of crypto) and one key is used to decode this data (the private key).
In an easier way to understand, if you were in France and you wanted to send a sexy postcard back to your lover over in New Zealand you could do this in two ways, symmetric or asymmetric. The symmetric method would involve encoding this data with a single key and sending both the encrypted data and the key to your loverboy/lovergirl named Stevie in New Zealand. This isn’t the safest venture as all someone must do is look at the key, decrypt your data and be in for a crude shock when they open it up and see your dangly bits. The safer way is to use asymmetric encryption, this involves encoding the data with Stevie’s public key and sending it over, when peeping tom gets his hands on this bit of data he can’t open it because the only way its able to be decoded is by using Stevie’s private key. Pretty crazy right? That’s how our crypto transactions work. When you wish to send funds to someone you send it to their public key and the only way these funds can be accessed is by the other party using their private key.
This method is used by every crypto exchange/wallet there is, some may use a phrase of a few random words as a way to log on but its still the same stuff. We use the public keys to send coins around, want to send your Ethereum from Bittrex to MyEtherWallet? No worries, chuck in the public key and you're good to go, log into MEW and you'll see your funds there ready to use.