What is the difference between wallet create and create account?

Question

I get this -

cleos wallet private_keys -n trevoro1

password: [[ "EOS7oVsWPXFXYrxZARSf5qZ5ApSYwX882VpFdqESWap4ecxiUH7Jc", "5KRb9FhAusiMGMqiQokVcAbLizLtdTvXXSgieiYVqAwi6eeobdr" ] ]

Then when I tried to create a new account I get a strange error -

cleos create account trevoro1 trevoro1new
EOS7oVsWPXFXYrxZARSf5qZ5ApSYwX882VpFdqESWap4ecxiUH7Jc
EOS7oVsWPXFXYrxZARSf5qZ5ApSYwX882VpFdqESWap4ecxiUH7J

c

Error 3090003: Provided keys, permissions, and delays do not satisfy declared authorizations Ensure that you have the related private keys inside your wallet and your wallet is unlocked.

I tried a few variations on this. What exactly is the difference between wallet create and account create; and what is the owner key vs the active key?

Answer 1

1. wallet & account

   • A wallet is software that protects and makes use of your keys. It is stored in your local storage and you can add your keys by cleos wallet import to sign transaction.
   • An account is a human-readable identifier that is stored on the blockchain. Account creations is done by transaction, so you should have existing account to create new account. (or, you can use external services to create EOS.IO account)

2. owner key & active key

   • owner key symbolizes ownership of an account. Generally, it is suggested that owner is kept in cold storage and not shared with anyone. owner can be used to recover another permission that may have been compromised.
   • active key is used for transferring funds, voting for producers and making other high-level account changes.

Answer 2

What exactly is the difference between wallet create and account create?

Wallet create is the code to create a wallet for you. Wallets are used to store private keys of your accounts.

eg:

cleos wallet create -n mywallet

You can create an account using the following command. This is the latest way of creating an account as per developer portal. The account create command is deprecated, that may be the reason you got error.

cleos system newaccount [OPTIONS] creator name OwnerKey [ActiveKey]

There are a number of options available to add it with this command like stake-net,stake-cpu etc.

what is the owner key vs the active key?

From the developer portal, we could find its definition as follows,

Every account has two native named permissions

owner authority symbolizes ownership of an account. There are only a few transactions that require this authority, but most notably, are actions that make any kind of change to the owner authority. Generally, it is suggested that owner is kept in cold storage and not shared with anyone. owner can be used to recover another permission that may have been compromised.

active authority is used for transferring funds, voting for producers and making other high-level account changes.

Simply, the owner key has a higher privilege than the active key.