Hello in the wallet tab in Deadalus under “More > Settings > Wallet public key” there’s some key… It took me a while to find out what’s the difference between that one and the adresses.
This one is called xpub key correct?
Why do I have to enter a password to view this xpub key if it’s a PUBLIC key?
Can I enter this xpub key (More > Settings > Wallet public key) on any pubic website ie give it to anybody or does it contain private information like private keys and the seed?
Is there an explorer which supports these xpub keys?
I cannot find anything about this and any help is highly appriciated.
For point 3, public keys are derived from secret keys, this operation is one-way only, you can not get the private key of anyone knowing its public key or rather not in a reasonable time. As for the seed, you can see it as an encoded form (not encrypted) of your private key.
Not exactly, I mean you don’t give your public key to people but one of your addresses, and they are derived from public key. You probably noticed already that your wallet can have many addresses, as I’m not able to launch Daedalus right now, I’ll hazard a guess. Since your addresses can be derived from your public key then it can be considered as sensitive data, pertaining to your privacy, hence the password requirement. When someone has your stake key or your public key, then he is able to see all transactions related to your wallet. If you want to play with keys and addresses, I’d suggest reading
A key, whether private or public, is a sequence of bytes, whereas an address is encoded in base58, there are other differences, but these are the most visible. Base58 is somewhat similar to base64 minus padding char and a few ambiguous characters like 0, O, I, 1…