The public key is the address to which others can send you the money, while the private key is that which you will use to send money to anyone. It is important that ONLY you should know your private key; otherwise anyone who knows your private key can steal your money.
You should not lose or reveal your private key come what may. Otherwise, losing your private key is similar to losing your money. You should use at least two different techniques to save and store your private keys.
As of now, let us discuss two methods of storage that can be used to store crypto money; hot storage, and cold storage.
As a recap, a wallet is used to −
- Send and receive money as cryptocurrency
- Collect and store coins created by the miner
- Synchronize blockchain with all nodes of the network
Opening a wallet is fairly simple; one can download free and paid bitcoin wallets from internet. Some deal only in bitcoins while others handle multiple cryptocurrencies.
A Bitcoin wallet is simply an app, software, website, or device that manages Bitcoin private keys for you.