Public-Private Key Cryptography

Now that we understand hash functions, we will explore the second fundamental cryptographic primitive, public-private key cryptography.

Basic Concepts - Identity in Bitcoin - Clip from Lecture 2: Protocol and Consensus: A High Level Overview [3 min video]

This quick video clip from Blockchain at Berkeley explains the value of why we need public and private keys on the blockchain. It creates an analogy between the public and private key pair of a cryptographic identity to an email address and password pair. It also gives a sense of scale to the magnitude of the number of public keys.

Why Do I Need Public-Private Key Cryptography on the Blockchain? - WeTrust, 2017 [3 min read]

This article by Leon Di of WeTrust summarizes the previous video in text form.

Bitcoin - Digital Signatures - Khan Academy, 2013 [10 min video]

In this video from Khan Academy, Zulfikar Ramzan goes through an example of how public-private key cryptography can be used between two participants Alice and Bob to prove validity of a message and its sender.

Creating Ethereum Keypairs - Decypher [16 min video]

This video from Decypher gives a great demo of how public-private key pairs work in the Ethereum blockchain. Using tools like Web3, EthereumJS, and eth3r.co, Jordan Leigh shows the fundamentals of key generation and even a little bit of an introduction to using Etherscan.