How do I access the blockchain?
All of you will probably have a bank account or any other kind of account whether it is used for mailing, gaming or any other purpose. Those accounts are all saved in one place, which allocates the account name to the account user. In a decentralized network, this is not how it works, due to the reason that there is no central instance controlling and maintaining the accounts.
In a decentralized network such as Bitcoin, users differentiate between private keys and public addresses. You might already assume what each one could be.
When you are creating an email account, you will first check whether the wanted address is already taken, and then you choose a password. By creating blockchain access, is working the other way around. The private key is a randomly created code which is your password and allocation of resources at once. It usually contains 32 or 64 characters and numbers. It might look like this:
48DHQUS5CBG8RHTMS268F5S4DGANBGD53HTUETDG654G2F15 8D2F3G4CBVMD4F5G
After the private key was created - this can be done by yourself using random characters or by a wallet - the public address will appear automatically based on the private key.
(In case you are wondering whether it is easy to guess your private address by knowing the public address - it is not. The mathematics behind it is very complicated and based on several cryptographic formulas such as SHA256.
The important thing to know it is quite easy (for a computer) to calculate the public address based on your private address, but it cannot be done the opposite way. Computers would need to “guess” the right combination which would take millions of years.)
The public address will then be your “account name”, meaning if someone wants to send you money he will need the public address. Never give away your private key!
A blockchain and a private key CANNOT be hacked, the only thing that could be hacked is your computer where the private key is saved. We will have a better look at wallets at a later stage of this book.
The most important thing for you to remember is: the private key is your password and allocation of resources on the blockchain. If you give it to someone, this someone can control your assets. If you lose it, your coins are gone. The public address, on the other hand, is like your account number at your bank - you can share it without any doubt to receive assets.
In case you want to track your transaction within the blockchain and see how many validations it has already received, you can easily access it with the so-called “block explorer”. Here you can see the latest blocks which were mined and the transactions which were contained. If you are looking for your transaction, you can either get redirected from the exchange (if you used one) or search for the address or transaction on this site (https://blockexplorer.com/).
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