The word "cryptocurrency" has two components to it - "cryptography" and "currency." As you can imagine, cryptography is at the heart and soul of cryptocurrency. Asymmetric and symmetric encryption are the two main cryptography methods, and this guide breaks them both down. Read on for a fascinating insight into the world of cryptographic encryption! 

What is Cryptography? Asymmetric vs. Symmetric encryption

Cryptography constructs and analyzes protocols to prevent outside parties from reading confidential information. Cryptography utilizes mathematics, physics, communication, information technology, and computer science. Aside from cryptocurrencies, cryptography is widely used in fields like computer passwords, military comms, and electronic commerce.

The goal of cryptography is to convert plaintext to ciphertext and back. Plain text is just a standard text written in any human-understandable language, like English, and it is easy to decode. On the other hand, the ciphertext is...