What Is Ether Account

Ethereum Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟What Is Ether Account

This section describes what is an Ether account on an Ethereum network.

An Ether account is actually a password protected keystore containing a private and public key pair.

Once an Ether account is created, you can give out the public key of the account to anyone who wants to send you Ether money on the Ethereum network.

The private key of an Ether account is needed to spend the Ether money associated with the public key on the Ethereum network.

An Ether account is actually independent of any Ethereum network. You can create an Ether account on a private Ethereum network and use it on the main Ethereum network.

In the previous tutorial, I created an Ether account on my personal network. Now let's see where the account is located:

Get a list of files in \herong\Ethereum\personal\keystore, you see the Ether account file named as "UTC--2018-xx-xx.389227400Z--05d4e1a499775ce9d681abd50bda655c7b5ccb90" with 491 bytes in size.

The public key of the Ether account is included in the file name. The private key is stored inside the file and protected by the password.

Ethereum networks do not store the Ether balance inside the account file. The balance of an account is calculated by looping through all transactions associated with the public key on the blockchain. So you can copy this file to the .\keystore folder to the data directory of any other Ethereum data folder to use it.

It's important to backup your Ether account file to an off-line device and write done the password in a safe place. There is no way to spend your Ether money without the private key stored in the account file.