Cryptocurrency

The term "cryptocurrency" was coined by economist Nick Szabo in 1998, with reference to a coin that uses cryptographic principles in lieu of a central issuing authority.

The earliest cryptosystems were based on public key cryptography, where keys are related to names and addresses, and could be shared.

This method of cryptosystem is still widely used today in a number of cryptocurrencies and digital signature schemes, including Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Most cryptosystems are based on more general techniques that use digital signatures instead of names and addresses to solve the security problem.

A small number of systems, including PGP and DigiCash, rely on public-key cryptography and address derivation.

Pseudorandom number generation is usually one or more operations that produce a pseudorandom number between 0 and 1.

This is also known as a cryptographic key, where one or more keys are used to generate the private key, and which are then used to generate the corresponding public key, which is then used to encrypt data.