Now that we have invented a way to bring new coins into the system in a steady and predictable way, and a way to write where they move in a shared list we cannot endlessly edit, we need to come up with those places where those coins will go to. Where will the users store their coins? How do those coins get there? How do they send them afterwards to others if they want to?
We need to create wallets.
We call them wallets because for the most part we can carry them with us (unless you’re like my brother who has a wallet that is so filled with junk that is as thick as it’s wide). But we could call them safes, or purses, or any other analogy to the physical money world.
But since our money is digital, we cannot really “put stuff inside a container” for real. To solve that problem, we need to change the analogy.
A crypto wallet is not really a wallet. It’s usual and easy to call them that because from the outside looks like we put our money in and out of them, but crypto wallets work more like a keychain. That’s because in reality moneros are not sent anywhere, they’re written into existence on the famous blockchain, and with your keys, you prove that you’re the owner and can do what you want with them.
So instead of having a box where players of the Monero game store their coins, we’ll have one big list of all the coins in the game, and the only thing we need to give users are keys that they use to prove they own their coins.
It’s like one big giant bank we run between all the players, and we’ll give everybody an infinite amount of safety boxes, each with their own matching keys to open them.