Hey everyone. Welcome back to the course. Now let's learn about wallets, digital signatures and protocols. wallets are the primary entities which are used to interact with the blockchain. digital signatures are the identity proofs for the people who are transacting over the blockchain and protocols are the central core system which make the complete blockchain function with the desired behavior. What is a blockchain wallet?

A blockchain wallet is similar to a digital wallet that allows the participants to manage their cryptocurrencies. You might have used wallets as PayPal or Razer pay for the transfer of funds. blockchain wallets are similar to those kind of wallets. But instead of holding the fiat currency, blockchain wallets help you to do the transactions of cryptocurrencies. A blockchain wallet consists of two major things a private key and a public Click address, a private key is used to send the transaction and the public addresses are used to receive the transaction. blockchain wallet can also hold multiple addresses to accept multiple transactions.

And then these addresses can be combined to form a collective balance of cryptocurrencies, which can be taken as input to send the cryptocurrencies to somebody else. Make sure you never give your private key to anyone. Your private key is the entity which acts as your digital signature and holds your cryptocurrencies. If you lose your private key, then you might also lose your cryptocurrencies. private keys are mainly used to sign the transaction and once this transaction has been signed, it is broadcasted over the network to be added into the block. Specific blockchain wallets even help you to transmit the transactions over the network.

Most blockchain wallets use the services of difference Risk providers for broadcasting the transactions. Usually, most of the blockchain wallets only show us the transactions and addresses of over accounts. There are no visible records of digital identities and personal information, which is in line with most of the public blockchain platforms. There are different types of blockchain wallet. Some of the major kinds of blockchain wallets are paper wallets, paper wallets are the wallets where you store your private keys on a piece of paper. If you lose your paper, then you might lose your private key to another type of wallet is a web wallet.

Web wallets are present on the internet and can be accessed through URL. One of the examples of web wallet is my ether wallet. Then there are mobile wallets mobile wallets are available in the form of an application in your mobile device. And you can use your mobile device to handle your cryptocurrencies. One more prominent type of wallet is desktop wallet. Next have wallets are like a software application which can be downloaded on your computer.

And then you can do the transactions of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is an example of text of wallet. Then we have the hardware wallets, which are the most secure wallets present in the blockchain ecosystem. Hardware wallets offer the storage of private key inside a hardware device, which you plug into your computer through USB port when you want to sign the transaction, treasure, and ledger nano s are the examples of hardware wallet. And finally, we have physical wallets, which are new to the market. They are in the form of smart cards similar to your ATM cards, which can be held and used to sign the transactions on the go.

Wallets help you to interact with blockchain, but distill signatures verify whether you are authorized to interact with blockchain or not. digital signatures are similar in working as the real signatures in the physical world. Whenever we are signing a contract or providing justification for a service, we need to identify our authority of performing the operations. For example, when you perform banking operations are saying any professional deal, you provide your signatures to verify that you are the one who is authorizing or performing the service. digital signatures behave similarly in the digital world. They are generated using cryptography which is more secure than the handwritten signatures.

In the world of blockchain. A private key is used to sign a message digitally, and the recipient can verify the message using the sender's public key. every transaction which is executed on the blockchain is digitally signed by the sender's private key, and anybody inside the network can verify that this transaction has a valid signature, as per the blockchain specification. SSL is an excellent example for the analog of digital signatures with blockchain. The websites over internet use SSL certificates to show their authorization. Most of the blockchain platforms also use ECC algorithms to sign the transactions digitally.

Now let's talk about protocols. You might have seen that every blockchain has some different functionalities. Bitcoin has a particular behavior, like the block size will always be one megabyte, and after 10 minutes, a new block will be added to the chain with 12.5 BTC awarded to the miner who confirms the block in the chain. The keys in the Bitcoin are using ECC algorithms which you can generate from the network and then use your keys to sign any transaction over the Bitcoin blockchain. Similarly, Ethereum blockchain has some other functionalities like smart contracts which are mirror to the legal action between two or more parties. smart contracts get executed on top of the Ethereum blockchain using the Ethereum virtual machine.

Other blockchain platforms like hyper ledger offer enterprise related behavior, and use new protocols such as gossip protocol to distribute information between different nodes. Every blockchain is embedded with some specific behavior that is programmed into it. protocols define this and help govern the functioning of the blockchain over time. Some examples of protocols can be taken from the pioneer of the blockchain world Bitcoin behaviors like block time, block size, block difficulty, block reward, difficulty having interval, difficulty adjustment, or use of the specific hashing algorithm are an excellent example of the blockchain protocols. In this session, we covered some of the core entities porting blockchain. In the next session we will talk about the advantages of blockchain over traditional technologies.

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