diff --git a/docs/public-address/subaddress.md b/docs/public-address/subaddress.md index 240e828..2a354d9 100644 --- a/docs/public-address/subaddress.md +++ b/docs/public-address/subaddress.md @@ -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