What's a Private Key?

Access to your wallet is secured through the use of the combination of public and private keys.

The public key can be thought of as being similar to your credit card or bank account number, while the private key is the secret PIN/CVC code used to validate access.

Derivation from private to public is a one way function, meaning that although deriving a public key from a private key will always yield the same result, the reverse operation is nearly impossible.

Currently, the standard private key is a 256 bit hexadecimal number, which means there are 16^64 possible combinations. That is, about 115,792 followed by 73 zeros, or more than three times the amount of stars in the universe.