Cryptography
a.k.a. Crypto (original meaning)
The science of protecting information with maths, so only the right people can read it or prove it came from them.
Cryptography is the art of secret writing turned into hard maths. It has two big jobs: keeping messages private (encryption) and proving who wrote something and that it wasn't tampered with (signatures and hashes).
Cryptocurrencies lean heavily on the second job. Your private key signs a transaction, and anyone can check that signature against your public key without ever seeing the private one. Hash functions, one-way fingerprints for data, glue each block to the last. The word "crypto" itself comes from here.
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