I get that cryptography protects cryptocurrencies, but as a non-techie, I don't understand how. What's stopping hackers from just cracking the codes and stealing everything? Is this stuff really unhackable?
The beauty of cryptography lies in the math, not the secrecy. The Paybis guide on what cryptography https://paybis.com/blog/glossary/cryptography/ is explains it perfectly: modern crypto uses 'trapdoor functions' - easy to compute one way, nearly impossible to reverse. Your wallet's private key is like a fingerprint mathematically linked to your public address. Even with all the world's computing power, guessing a valid private key would take billions of years. The guide's analogy to mixing paint colors makes this complex topic click - you can't 'unmix' the result to find the original components.