About key pairs

According to the mining pool, it looks like you have 1.61 bitcoin to claim from all the work you did earlier.

But wait, you don’t even have a wallet! You might be wondering where you can buy one. While you can purchase hardware to build certain kinds of wallets, you can actually just make one with your computer or mobile device. Let's do it!

If you signed up for an account at any point, you got something called a personal code. In cryptography, this is called a “private key” and it is often part of a pair:

  • Private key
  • Public key

A single key pair is all that’s needed to create a wallet and control the funds within it. When you want to spend bitcoin, you use the private key. When you want to receive bitcoin, you use the public key.