Читать книгу Bitcoin For Dummies - Peter Kent - Страница 45

Every Bitcoin or fraction of a Bitcoin is “stored” in the ledger associated with a particular “address.” An address is a unique string of letters and numbers. Here’s an example of a real one I just grabbed from the Bitcoin blockchain using the blockchain explorer at www.blockchain.com:

1L7hHWfJL1dd7ZhQFgRv8ke1PTKAHoc9Tq

Trillions of different address combinations are possible, so this address is fundamentally unique. All your Bitcoin is associated with one or more addresses. There’s nothing in the blockchain identifying you specifically, which is why Bitcoin is called pseudonymous it’s partly anonymous. Nothing in the blockchain says who owns what. However, the blockchain is also open and public. Anyone can look into the blockchain and see, within the ledger, how Bitcoin is being transferred from one address to another. So if you know who owns a particular address (as Bitcoin exchanges do, for instance; you’ll find out more about those in Chapter 3), you can see what that person did with their Bitcoin. That’s why it’s not completely anonymous.

Now, where do addresses come from? They come from wallets, which are software programs that generate addresses mathematically from a public key, which in turn was generated from a private key. In fact, wallets contain at least one private key, one associated public key, and one associated blockchain address. Which brings us to another subject you’re going to have to discover (just a little) about.