It depends on the project. Many cryptocurrencies (Like Bitcoin, Etherium, Litecoin) have a public ledger. So every transaction (participants + amount) is visible.
Other Projects (where Monero is the most well known) use special cryptographic systems to hide all that. So the only thing which can be observed by 3th parties is that some transaction was successful somewhere.
There are also projects which are private but prioritize efficiency (all the cryptographic hiding has a notable computation-cost) by sacrificing hidden amount or hidden participants.
Actually, you can think of all crypto as a log of transactions plus the infrastructure to create, manage, and provide information about those transactions. It is public, but the “accounts” are basically just blobs of numbers, so they can be hard to trace, depending on the platform.
source of trust on this can’t be centralized, thats what visa/mastercard are
You need to be able to calculate a balance
traditional currency does this by physically possessing things
you can’t “own” data; it’s fungible i.e. it can be copied trivially. If I copy my wallet onto your computer, who owns it?
digital currency gets around this with a ledger
that’s the detailed log of transactions
the transactions in the log are signed with cryptographic keys, the validity of the signature can be verified with the corresponding public keys. The owner of the private key (which never leaves your PC) is the owner of that wallet and is the only one who can generate the signature - the wallet has a 1:1 mapping to the public and private keys
(This is also why you don’t need accounts, your PC generates a random Private key, generates the corresponding Public key and that’s your wallet. Everyone accepts that it is your wallet because you have its private key)
This is just the very basic system that is traceable and there are newer schemes that are better. I’ll edit a writeup later when I have time.
I fully admit in advance I know very little about crypto, so please someone correct me if I’m wrong.
Isn’t part of crypto a detailed log of transactions?
Monero obfuscates transactions. Parties and amount are private.
It depends on the project. Many cryptocurrencies (Like Bitcoin, Etherium, Litecoin) have a public ledger. So every transaction (participants + amount) is visible.
Other Projects (where Monero is the most well known) use special cryptographic systems to hide all that. So the only thing which can be observed by 3th parties is that some transaction was successful somewhere. There are also projects which are private but prioritize efficiency (all the cryptographic hiding has a notable computation-cost) by sacrificing hidden amount or hidden participants.
Crypts currencies like Monero even hide that
Actually, you can think of all crypto as a log of transactions plus the infrastructure to create, manage, and provide information about those transactions. It is public, but the “accounts” are basically just blobs of numbers, so they can be hard to trace, depending on the platform.
Yes.
But also, how can you make digital payment work without one? Not a rhetorical question by the way, legitimately don’t know. llmost seems impossible.
My thought process:
(This is also why you don’t need accounts, your PC generates a random Private key, generates the corresponding Public key and that’s your wallet. Everyone accepts that it is your wallet because you have its private key)
This is just the very basic system that is traceable and there are newer schemes that are better. I’ll edit a writeup later when I have time.