EOS.IO Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users and developers of distributed applications built on top of the blockchain operating system, EOS.IO. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I saw this - https://medium.com/coinmonks/printing-hello-world-with-eos-smart-contract-50fbe873d1b4
I was a little confused that a wallet is created and then an account is created. I did not really see the purpose of both. What is the primary difference between an account and a wallet in eos?
They have an article in the official documentation explaining the differences:
The wallet can be thought of as a repository of public-private key pairs. These are needed to sign operations performed on the blockchain. Wallets and their content are managed by keosd. Wallets are accessed using cleos.
An account can be thought of as an on-chain identifier that has access permissions associated with it (i.e., a security principal). nodeos manages the publishing of accounts and account-related actions on the blockchain. The account management capabilities of nodeos are also accessed using cleos.
They are both based on key pairs (private key for encryption and public key for verification).
Wallet has nothing to do with the blockchain. It just stores a number of key pairs, securely, on a client machine.
Account resides on the blockchain. It has a name (human readable) and an owner key and an active key. Each of these keys have their own levels of permission, on the blockchain.
Wallet is not on the chain, but in your localhost computer, the wallet just stores all your private keys, that's it.
The wallet also has a private key that just used to protect your wallet not to be hacked.
Every EOS Account has one Owner Key and one Active Key associated with it that is used to sign transactions and control the Account. The Owner Key can be used to overwrite the Owner Key or the Active Key with a new EOS keypair for the account. Wallets are used to store EOS public/private Keypairs that can be assigned to an EOS account for use as an Active key or Owner Key.
