VIZ blockchain accounts, keys and authority types
In most of the first blockchain systems, the essence that owns tokens is the wallet - the public presentation of a private cryptographic key.
It is very easy to form a wallet. You generate a private key, memorise it, form its public presentation - this is your address for storing VIZ tokens. As proof of ownership of tokens, you must provide proof of ownership by signing the transfer data with your private key.
VIZ has inherited from Graphene an account system, an extended keychain system with different types of authorities, support for multi-signatures with delegated authority. Let's take a look at what this is and how it works together.
Account system
The entity that owns VIZ tokens - accounts. They are needed to protect the system from spam, to ensure the stable operation of DPOS and the convenience of the end user.
Accounts are a string of Latin characters (login) that people are used to. Logins in the account system are the address space for interaction in VIZ.
Examples of logins: petya6, alice4, prigskok.dom
Each account contains information about its balance, network share and other parameters important for the blockchain system.
The main features of an account are keychains, divided into different types of authorities.
Types of authorities
- Authority to account management (master, owner in the past).
- Authority to account asset management and important solutions (active).
- Authority to perform actions and sign published data (regular, posting in the past).
- Key for encrypting messages (memo).
- Key for block signing (signing, used by witnesses).
The most important type of authority is master. This is the key that allows you to change other authority keys in your account. Losing these keys will make it impossible to change other authorities. If this authority is taken over by an intruder, he may steal your account.
Active authority allows you to perform actions related to account tokens: transfer them to another account, delegate, vote for delegates and change authorities (except master).
Regular authority is used for the most frequent transactions: awarding other accounts, taking part in the work of the committee and signing the data published (e.g. in custom transactions or when interacting with off-chain websites).
Memo and Signing keys are not bindings (only 1 key is stored) and are used in highly specialised cases (encryption of correspondence and signing blocks).
Keyring
The types of master, active and regular authorities are presented in the form of a keyring. The mechanics of their work are enclosed in three ways:
- Delegation of authority rights to another account (specifying the login of an account that can perform the operation for you with its keychain of the same type).
For example, if you delegate access rights to an active third party account, that account will be able to manage your funds on the account without your involvement. - Multi Signature (multisig) - allows you to set the weight required to perform the transaction and a set of keys with different weights.
- Multi-key - allows you to create a separate key for a third-party application so that you do not have to give away your used key.
For the majority of users the situation is actual when in a keyring there is only 1 key which weight is enough for performance of operations of the set type of accesses.
Main password
Some applications use a single way to generate private keys for the convenience of users. It is related to generation from the view line: login+password+authority type. In this way, all types of authorities can be obtained from the master password. If, for example, an active key is lost, the master password to the account will allow it to be recovered.
This simplification has been made to make it easier for an untrained user to understand a complex keyring system.
Simplified single authority key
A single authority key is a key recorded as the manager of each type of account authority. This type of key is created in VIZ to simplify access for new users who are just trying and understanding VIZ.
This type of authority is extended to users who have registered using an invite code (check) or have used the internal anonymous registration system. Once they have become familiar with the VIZ blocking system and decide that they want to have separate keys for each access type, they can change their account authorities via a control panel.
Conclusion
The system of separate authorities types in accounts is quite flexible and allows you to create complex interaction mechanics. For users who for the first time come across blockchain systems, there are simplified options that can be expanded by users themselves if necessary.