Category: 8.Beginner’s Guide to Digital Signatures

What is Bitcoin? While there are many different ways to answer this question, now that you’ve gone through the previous lessons, you can now answer with confidence! Let’s now take all the concepts you’ve learned and put them all together. Bitcoin (uppercase “B”)  is a new SYSTEM that manages the creation and ownership of digital “money”…

How do Bitcoin transactions work? A Bitcoin transaction is a transfer of a certain amount of bitcoins from one address to another address that is recorded on the blockchain. But how does this “transfer” process actually work? In this lesson, I’m going to show you how a Bitcoin transaction works from start to finish. First, we’ll look at…

In this lesson, we’re going to learn how a digital signature actually works in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In order to get to this point, we’ve had to learn several technical concepts first since they are the “building blocks” needed to create a digital signature: If you’re NOT familiar with these concepts, they were explained…

How do digital signatures work? Before we get into the technical details of how digital signatures work, I wanted to help ease you in by sharing a funny story. You might think that digital signatures may sound complicated, but if you pay close attention to this story, they’re really not. Hello! I’m Batman! Imagine Batman…

What is asymmetric encryption? Asymmetric encryption is a type of encryption that uses two separate but mathematically connected “keys” to encrypt and decrypt data and protect it from unauthorized access or use. These keys are known as: Together, they’re called a “public and private key pair” or just “key pair“. One of the keys, the public key, is available…

In order to truly grasp the concept of digital signatures, we must first understand how encryption works. Encryption is a key concept in cryptography. In order to understand the process of how transactions are “signed“, which is required to be able to spend your bitcoins (and other cryptocurrencies), you need to be familiar with the concept of…

What’s a digital signature? When you want to send some bitcoins, your wallet creates a “transaction” and sends it to a node on the Bitcoin network which then broadcasts it to other nodes. When you initiate a Bitcoin transaction, you must prove to every node in the Bitcoin network that you are authorized to spend those funds. What is…