Your public key acts as your wallet address. You can circulate this address to anyone who can then send cryptos to that wallet.
To spend those cryptos, the wallet owner uses the private key that created that wallet to encrypt a message authorising the transfer of those cryptos to a different wallet. This encrypted message can only be deciphered with the public key derived from that private key, thus proving ownership of that public key — i.e. the wallet.
Without the private key, no-one can spend your cryptos. The corollary of that is that anyone who does have the private key can spend your cryptos.
The implication is that the "owner" of a wallet, and the cryptos within that wallet, is the person (or persons) in possession of the private key. If you share that private key with anyone else, they become joint owners of that wallet in a practical sense, but not in a legal sense.
Personal management of the security of your seed phrase, and hence your private keys, is of paramount importance.
Examples of a public key (these are our public addresses for donations):
BTC: bc1qa636k5p50ylz22pjyuz0nxzuvpl4n4apjmvh7e
ETH: 0x9C8d69427ba085d56F6de5E9b530edE7f0CAb8db
Private keys will look similar — a long sequence of apparently random letters and numbers — but they stay private.
Your public keys are derived from your private key and only that private key. Your private key cannot be identified from any of your public keys.
Please feel free to contact us with any questions.