SVTC Luncheon | Cryptocurrency and Bitcoin: The Deeper Dive

Join SVTC on March 1st for an informative luncheon on cryptocurrency!

You asked for tech answers, so here we go! Building on our January luncheon, Dr. Morgan Benton (JMU CISE) will “dig deeper” with us and discuss how blockchain technology works and difference between bitcoin and ethereum. In order to understand what he’ll cover, attendees should be aware of how hashing algorithms work, and know what a public/private key is.

Please read ahead:

• Public key cryptography, or asymmetrical cryptography, is any cryptographic system that uses pairs of keys: public keys which may be disseminated widely, and private keys which are known only to the owner. This accomplishes two functions: authentication, where the public key verifies a holder of the paired private key sent the message, and encryption, where only the paired private key holder can decrypt the message encrypted with the public key. Details: Public-key cryptography (Wikipedia)
• A very good and easy-to-digest explanation for Symmetric Cryptography, Asymmetric Cryptography, and Public Key Cryptography is here:  Explaining public-key cryptography to non-geeks. (Panayotis Vryonis/Medium.com)
• About  hashing algorithms: The main features of a hashing algorithm are that they are a one way function – or in other words you can get the output from the input but you can’t get the input from the output – just like elliptic curve cryptography where you can’t get the private key from the public key. The other property is that the same input creates the same output. More details re. hashing algorithms (Cryptocompare.com)