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What is wallet? How is it uniquely identified?

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2 Answers 2

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What is a wallet?

Its software that stores your cryptocurrency, manages the keys to your wallet, and watches for transactions.

How is it uniquely identified?

As jakob said above, it is made unique by the keys and addresses.

With the Bitcoin wallet addresses being 26-35 numerals and characters long, you can see how it is unique.

Hope this helped!

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It's software that manages your keys, addresses, watches for incoming transactions and creates new transactions. What makes it unique are the keys and addresses. They are generated in pseudo random way.

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  • Saying that keys are not generated in a 'pseudo random way' is misleading/false, anything less than highly entropic key generation would not be safe for real-world use. I am guessing you are referring to HD wallet key derivation from a single input seed, but there is nothing pseudo random about that (the seed is generated by a strong RNG system, and then keys are deterministically derived from it).
    – chytrik
    Apr 7, 2018 at 18:05
  • @chytrik PRNG is actually the correct technical term here. The pseudo does not imply it is insecure or less than cryptographic in strength. It just means no actual randomness was involved. Apr 7, 2018 at 18:22
  • @PieterWuille hmm I was unaware of that, my mistake! In that case, I think Jakob's answer would be correct in relation to HD key derivation, but incorrect for non-HD wallets (or for HD wallet seed generation).
    – chytrik
    Apr 7, 2018 at 18:29
  • @chytrik I used the word pseudorandom because I wanted to depict the keys are not delivered together with the software and are in certain way generated 'in the field'. If I said random, it would be also, and perhaps even more, wrong, but since the original question was "what is the wallet" I think we don't have to complicate answer with things like 'what is deterministic', 'what is true randomness' and 'how exactly seeds are generated' and 'what is inherent part of wallet' and 'what is external source'.
    – jakob
    Apr 7, 2018 at 20:33

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