Add account documentation

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Piotr Włodarek 2018-09-14 12:04:32 +02:00
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commit a1ba2fc042

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@ -18,19 +18,24 @@ This way services like [Shapeshift](https://shapeshift.io) wouldn't know it is y
Note it won't help if you have an account with the service. Then your payouts are already linked in the service database, regardless of Monero.
## Group incoming payments
## Group funds into accounts
Think income streams.
!!! Note
Feel free to skip this if your are new to Monero. Accounts are not essential and currently not supported by the GUI.
Subaddresses allow to group incoming transactions within a single wallet.
**Accounts** are a convenience wallet-level feature to group subaddresses under one label and balance.
User interface allows to assign convenience labels to subaddresses.
You may want to organize your funds into accounts like "cash", "work", "trading", "mining", "donations", etc.
You may want to organize your incoming funds into a streams like "donations", "work", etc.
As accounts are only groupings of subaddresses, they themselves do not have an address.
This is similar to subaccounts in your bank account. There is a very important difference though.
Accounts are deterministically derived from the root private key along with subaddresses.
In Monero funds don't really sit on public addresses. Public addresses are conceptually a gateway or a routing mechanism. Funds sit on the unspent outputs. Thus, a single transaction can aggregate and spend outputs from multiple addresses.
As of September 2018 accounts are only supported by the CLI wallet and missing from GUI wallet.
Accounts are similar to subaccounts in your classic bank account. There is a very important difference though. In Monero funds don't really sit on accounts or public addresses. Public addresses are conceptually a gateway or a routing mechanism. Funds sit on transactions' unspent outputs. Thus, a single transaction can - in principle - aggregate and spend outputs from multiple addresses (and by extension from multiple accounts). The CLI or GUI wallet may not directly support creating such transactions for simplicity.
In short, think of accounts as a **soft** grouping of your funds.
## Why not multiple wallets?
@ -41,7 +46,7 @@ Additionally, you conveniently manage your subaddresses within a single user int
## Wallet level feature
Subaddresses are a wallet-level feature to construct and interpret transactions. They do not affect the consensus.
Subaddresses and accounts are a wallet-level feature to construct and interpret transactions. They do not affect the consensus.
## Data structure