This is a Picture of a Private Key

[posternat]

Nice way of looking at it. The math behind the world and the things that can be seen when viewing them just right are pretty amazing. It is like playing with golden numbers and things like that and watching the results. I know that mining bitcoin itself is useless, but it would be nice to have the process graphically seen, like with the old BOINC projects.

[pebwindkraft]

excellent explanation of a private key!!
But then again, what is the wallet if its now the public address?

The wallet can be seen as a container for your private keys and the derived public keys, and this container has special locks to open it (seeds, passwords, ...). Once you opened it, you can create with the wallet software a bitcoin transaction, that confirms to the rules of he network, and the wallet has software to send a transaction into the network. Also it is able to request data from the network (with light wallets), or it stores the blockchain itself  on a local drive (full node).
So the wallet is a piece of software that makes it easy for the enduser, to communicate/participate in the network.