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CLI Wallet Cookbook

cass edited this page Aug 21, 2015 · 8 revisions

Graphene CLI Wallet Cookbook

Running a Local Test Network

Right now, there is no public testnet, so the only way to test is to run your own private network. To do this, launch a witness node to generate blocks. In the directory where you built your graphene distribution:

cd programs/witness_node
# if you have previously run a witness node, you may need to remove the old blockchain.
# at this early stage, new commits often make it impossible to reuse an old database
#   rm -r witness_node_data_dir
./witness_node --rpc-endpoint "127.0.0.1:8090" --enable-stale-production -w \""1.6.0"\" \""1.6.1"\" \""1.6.2"\" \""1.6.3"\" \""1.6.4"\"

The initial genesis state has ten pre-configured delegates (1.6.0-9) that all use the same private key to sign their blocks, and the witness node has the private keys for these initial delgates built in.. Launching witness_node this way allows you to act as all ten delegates.

Now, in a second window, launch a cli_wallet process to interact with the network.

cd programs/cli_wallet
# similarly, if you have previously run a wallet, you may need to wipe out your 
# old wallet
#    rm wallet.json
./cli_wallet

Before doing anything with the new wallet, set a password and unlock the wallet.

Warning: your passwords will be displayed on the screen.

new >>> set_password my_password
locked >>> unlock my_password
unlocked >>>

Account Management

To create a new account, you will need to start with an existing account with some of the CORE asset that will pay the transaction fee registering your new account. The account paying this fee will be the Registrar.

In the initial genesis state, there are about a dozen pre-existing accounts. We use the 'nathan' account as a general purpose test account, and its private key is printed at witness startup to allow us to import it here:

# first, import the private key to take ownership of the 'nathan' account
unlocked >>> import_key "nathan" 5KQwrPbwdL6PhXujxW37FSSQZ1JiwsST4cqQzDeyXtP79zkvFD3
unlocked >>> list_my_accounts
[{
    "id": "1.2.15",
    ...
    "name": "nathan",
    ...
]
unlocked >>> list_account_balances nathan
unlocked >>>

We control the account now, but there is no money in the account yet. In the genesis state, none of the accounts have balances in them. In the first BitShares network, accounts were less tightly coupled to balances. Balances were associated with public keys, and an account could have hundreds of public keys with balances (or, conversely, public keys with balances could exist without any account associated with them). When the real network launches, each of the public keys with a balance will be converted into a balance object in Graphene, and they will not be associated with any account until their owner publishes a transaction claiming the balance.

In the test genesis state, there is only one balance object and it owns 100% of the funds in the system. Let's import that here:

unlocked >>> import_balance nathan [5KQwrPbwdL6PhXujxW37FSSQZ1JiwsST4cqQzDeyXtP79zkvFD3] true
unlocked >>> list_account_balances nathan
10000000000 CORE

So we now have an account to act as registrar and it has plenty of funds to pay the registration key for new accounts. Only lifetime (prime?) members are allowed to register accounts, so we must upgrade nathan first. Then, go ahead and create our test account named my-account:

# before nathan can create other accounts, we need to upgrade it to a prime member.
unlocked >>> upgrade_account nathan true
# register our account.  we list nathan as both the referrer and registrar.
unlocked >>> create_account_with_brain_key "this is the brain key for my account" my-account nathan nathan true

Like most methods in the wallet, create_account_with_brain_key's last parameter is the boolean broadcast. This parameter tells the wallet whether you want to publish the transaction on the network immediately, which is usually what you want to do. If you pass false, it will just create the transaction and sign it, and display it on the console, but it wouldn't be sent out onto the network. This could be used to build up a multi-sig transaction and collect the other signatures offline, or it could be used to construct a transaction in a offline cold wallet that you could put on a flash drive and broadcast from a machine connected to the network. Here, we'll always pass true for the broadcast parameter.

If you were to execute list_my_accounts now, you would see that you control both nathan and my-account.

Transferring Currency

Your newly-created account doesn't have any funds in it yet, the nathan account still has all the money. To send some CORE from nathan to your account, use the transfer command:

unlocked >>> transfer nathan my-account 10000 CORE "have some CORE" true

Becoming a Witness

To become a witness and be able to produce blocks, you first need to create a witness object that can be voted in.

Note: If you want to experiment with things that require voting, be aware that votes are only tallied once per day at the maintenance interval. For testing, it's helpful to change the GRAPHENE_DEFAULT_MAINTENANCE_INTERVAL in libraries/chain/include/graphene/chain/config.hpp to, say, 10 minutes.

Before we get started, we can see the current list of witnesses voted in, which will simply be the ten default witnesses:

unlocked >>> get_global_properties
...
  "active_witnesses": [
    "1.6.0",
    "1.6.1",
    "1.6.2",
    "1.6.3",
    "1.6.4",
    "1.6.5",
    "1.6.6",
    "1.6.7",
    "1.6.8",
    "1.6.9"
  ],
...

Only lifetime members can become witnesses, so you must first upgrade to a lifetime member. Upgrade and create our witness object.

unlocked >>> upgrade_account my-account true
unlocked >>> create_witness my-account "http://witness.bar.com/" true
{
  "ref_block_num": 139,
  "ref_block_prefix": 3692461913,
  "relative_expiration": 3,
  "operations": [[
      21,{
        "fee": {
          "amount": 0,
          "asset_id": "1.3.0"
        },
        "witness_account": "1.2.16",
        "url": "http://witness.bar.com/",
        "block_signing_key": "PUBLIC KEY",
        "initial_secret": "00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
      }
    ]
  ],
  "signatures": [
      "1f2ad5597af2ac4bf7a50f1eef2db49c9c0f7616718776624c2c09a2dd72a0c53a26e8c2bc928f783624c4632924330fc03f08345c8f40b9790efa2e4157184a37"
  ]
}

Our witness is registered, but it can't produce blocks because nobody has voted it in. You can see the current list of active witnesses with get_global_properties:

unlocked >>> get_global_properties
{
  "active_witnesses": [
    "1.6.0",
    "1.6.1",
    "1.6.2",
    "1.6.3",
    "1.6.4",
    "1.6.5",
    "1.6.7",
    "1.6.8",
    "1.6.9"
  ],
  ...

Now, we should vote our witness in. Vote all of the shares in both my-account and nathan in favor of your new witness.

unlocked >>> vote_for_witness my-account my-account true true
unlocked >>> vote_for_witness nathan my-account true true

Now we wait until the next maintenance interval. get_dynamic_global_properties tells us when that will be in next_maintenance_time. Once the next maintenance interval passes, run get_global_properties again and you should see that your new witness has been voted in.

Even though it's voted in, it isn't producing any blocks yet because we only told the witness_node to produce blocks for 1.6.0 - 1.6.9 on the command line, and it doesn't know the private key for the witness. Get the witness object using get_witness and take note of two things. The id is displayed in get_global_properties when the witness is voted in, and we will need it on the witness_node command line to produce blocks. We'll also need the public signing_key so we can look up the correspoinding private key.

Once we have that, run dump_private_keys which lists the public-key private-key pairs to find the private key.

Warning: dump_private_keys will display your keys unencrypted on the terminal, don't do this with someone looking over your shoulder.

unlocked >>> get_witness my-account
{
  "id": "1.6.10",
  "witness_account": "1.2.16",
  "signing_key": "GPH7vQ7GmRSJfDHxKdBmWMeDMFENpmHWKn99J457BNApiX1T5TNM8",
}
unlocked >>> dump_private_keys
[[
  ...
  ],[
    "GPH7vQ7GmRSJfDHxKdBmWMeDMFENpmHWKn99J457BNApiX1T5TNM8",
    "5JGi7DM7J8fSTizZ4D9roNgd8dUc5pirUe9taxYCUUsnvQ4zCaQ"
  ]
]

Now we need to re-start the witness, so shut down the wallet (ctrl-d), and shut down the witness (ctrl-c). Re-launch the witness, now mentioning the new witness 1.6.10 and its keypair:

./witness_node --rpc-endpoint=0.0.0.0:8090 --enable-stale-production --witness-id \""1.6.0"\" \""1.6.1"\" \""1.6.2"\" \""1.6.3"\" \""1.6.4"\"  \""1.6.5"\" \""1.6.6"\" \""1.6.7"\" \""1.6.8"\" \""1.6.9"\"  \""1.6.10"\" --private-key "[\"GPH7vQ7GmRSJfDHxKdBmWMeDMFENpmHWKn99J457BNApiX1T5TNM8\", \"5JGi7DM7J8fSTizZ4D9roNgd8dUc5pirUe9taxYCUUsnvQ4zCaQ\"]"

If you monitor the output of the witness_node, you should see it generate blocks signed by your witness:

Witness 1.6.10 production slot has arrived; generating a block now...
Generated block #367 with timestamp 2015-07-05T20:46:30 at time 2015-07-05T20:46:30

Becoming a Delegate

Becoming a delegate is almost the same as becoming a witness, but it is simpler because delegates don't have a separate private key for signing blocks.

As for witnesses, only lifetime members can become delegates, so you must first upgrade to a lifetime member if you haven't already. Upgrade and create our delegate object.

unlocked >>> upgrade_account my-account true
unlocked >>> create_delegate my-account "http://delegate.baz.com/" true

Now that we're registered as a delegate, we should vote e should vote our delegate in. Vote all of the shares in both my-account and nathan in favor of your new delegate.

unlocked >>> vote_for_delegate my-account my-account true true
unlocked >>> vote_for_delegate nathan my-account true true

Like with witnesses, you will have to wait for the next maintenance interval before the delegate becomes active. Get the id of the delegate with:

unlocked >>> get_delegate my-account
{
  "id": "1.5.10",
  ...

and then run get_global_properties after the maintenance period and you should see the new delegate 1.5.10 listed in the active_delegates list.