Many people ask, what makes digital assets valuable? To put it simply, it's not just a technical issue, but a product of the integration of economics, cryptography, and distributed networks.

Let's start with the revolution of the ledger. How do traditional banks keep accounts? Centralized ledgers. The bank has the final say, and only their master ledger reflects your balance. Digital assets operate completely differently — a distributed ledger. Every participant in the network has a full copy of the ledger. What are the benefits of this? No one can tamper with it alone, because to do so, they would need to alter the majority of the ledgers across the network, which is practically impossible.

Where is the true significance of digital assets? Decentralization, inability to audit, no one can freeze your assets, and transactions can be made without permission. The money is 100% yours. It doesn't rely on banks for guarantees; security is ensured by mathematics.

Let's look at how cryptography, this lock and key, works. The public key is like your bank card number, which can be shared openly. Others can send you funds using this number. The private key is your password, known only to you. As long as you have the private key, you can control all assets at that address. Hash functions are even more impressive — they turn any length of data into a fixed-length unique "fingerprint." Change a punctuation mark in the input, and the output is completely different. This guarantees that transaction data has not been tampered with.

So where does trust come from? Without a central arbiter like a bank, the entire network must reach consensus. Consensus mechanisms have emerged. For example, in Bitcoin, miners compete by hashing power...