Describe the concept of public and private key with your own words.
what I’ve come to understand is that concept of public and private keys is that the private key generates the public key. the public key is used to encrypt a message to the holder of the private key. only the holder of the private key can decode the message/s sent to him/her.
What 2 use-cases can public key cryptography be used for?
The 1st case used for is the encrypting of messages to send over a public network to communicate with a private key holder that generates a public key for anyone to use to get in touch with the private key holder.
The 2nd case use, typically in cryptocurrencies is called digital signatures. when bob receives a message from Alice, he can verify that Alice sent the message by seeing the digital signature and checking the public key and verify mathematically that it originated from the private key that created the public key. the signature is created with the private key.