Introduction

Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More generally, cryptography is about constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages.

Types of Cryptography

Symmetric Key: It is an encryption system where the sender and receiver of the message can use a single common key to encrypt and decrypt messages.

Asymmetric key: Under this system, a pair of keys is used to encrypt and decrypt information. A public key is used for encryption and a private key is used for decryption.

Hash Function: There is no usage of any key in this algorithm. A hash value with a fixed length is calculated as per the plain text which makes it impossible for the contents of plain text to be recovered.

Advantages

There are a huge number of advantages of cryptography in blockchain; some of them are listed below:

Encryption
Immutability
Security
Scalability
Non-repudiation
Prevent hackers

Limitations

Below are some limitations of blockchain cryptography:

Difficult access to information
High availability
No Protection Against Vulnerabilities
Expensive
Vulnerability

Conclusion

Cryptography is an essential part of the internal workings of blockchain technology. Public key encryption serves as the basis for blockchain wallets and transactions, cryptographic hashing functions provide an immutability feature, and Merkle trees organize transactions while allowing blockchains to be more efficient. The basic principles of cryptography perfectly correspond to the basic characteristics of blockchain technology. While digital signatures are trusted tools for encrypting blockchain network communication, cryptographic hash has better potential for cryptography.

Below are the links to resources that I am following for learning Blockchain Development.

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Beginners Guide to Cryptography.

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