Читать книгу Cryptocurrency All-in-One For Dummies онлайн

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Shhh. Don’t tell anyone. That’s the crypto in cryptography and cryptocurrency. It means “secret.” In the cryptocurrency world, it mainly refers to being “anonymous.”

Historically, cryptography was an ancient art for sending hidden messages. (The term comes from the Greek word krypto logos, which means secret writing.) The sender encrypted the message by using some sort of key. The receiver then had to decrypt it. For example, 19th-century scholars decrypted ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics when Napoleon’s soldiers found the Rosetta Stone in 1799 near Rosetta, Egypt. In the 21st-century era of information networks, the sender can digitally encrypt messages, and the receiver can use cryptographic services and algorithms to decrypt them.

What does Napoleon have to do with cryptocurrencies? Cryptocurrencies use cryptography to maintain security and anonymity. That’s how digital coins, even though they’re not monetized by any central authority or regulatory body, can help with security and protection from double-spending, which is the risk of your digital cash being used more than once.