Recently I have noticed that there are frequent communication difficulties caused from the technical wording. Often people can't distinguish between the basic terms and therefore I wrote this article to use it as reference material.
There are a few basic terms everyone who owns cryptocurrencies should know. It's much easier to get help if you can communicate with each other and understand the more technically versed people.
The standard wallet of DeepOnion. It allows to send and receive funds and is also a full node, which means it validates and secures the blockchain.
https://deeponion.org/#downloads (DeepOnion, anonymous cryptocurrency, anonymous transactions)
DeepOnion-qt is considered a full wallet because it needs the entire blockchain to be ready to use. Light wallets instead receive their data from a trusted source and download only as much as they need to be operable. Currently DeepOnion does not have a light wallet.
Hot wallets are connected to the internet and considered as 'possible' compromised. Cold wallets instead are typically created on an offline computer and the private keys are never exposed to the internet.
Cold wallet: DeepOnion-qt wallet or paper wallet generated on an offline computer and never used on an online computer. Sometimes hardware wallets are also called cold wallet.
Your private key is used to sign transactions. This happens automatically by your wallet, which then broadcasts the transaction to the network. Every address have their own private key. It's recommended to have a backup from all your private keys.
https://deeponion.org/community/threads/tutorial-how-to-backup-your-entire-wallet-and-all-private-keys-including-change-addresses.23622/ (Tutorial: How To Backup Your Entire Wallet And All Private Keys (including Change Addresses))
The public key is your wallet address. It is derived from the private key and as the name suggests it is intended to be public.
Wallet.dat
This is the file used by DeepOnion-qt. It stores all your addresses and private keys and therefore it is recommended to encrypt it and have multiple backups from it.
The password which is used to encrypt your wallet.dat file. This is different from your private key and can only be used in combination with the wallet.dat file.
When sending funds your wallet needs to create a string which holds all the information. This is called a transaction and contains at least the receiver, the change address, the amount and which input should be used. It looks like this.
Every transaction has a unique Id which can be used to find it in your wallet or on every explorer. It looks like this.
3f447721af29510b35c157ee7300e4075b378b63740f2fffc22aa1684ba21d83
Your transactions need to be signed to get accepted from the network. They are signed automatically by your wallet with the private key from the address.
Transactions are broadcasted to the network. This means it is send to all nodes of the network.
The above described terms should be the most important ones. If you would like to have additional terms explained, add them in the comments. Please let me also know when terms are hard to understand and I will update the explanation.
I published this article also on the DeepOnion community forum.
https://deeponion.org/community/threads/article-basic-technical-terms-reference-material.33887/
