Help:Accounts explained

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You can have different addresses in order to receive payments. Think of addresses as multiple postboxes around the outside of your house. Bitcoin allows accounts too. Each account owns a bunch of addresses. Taking our earlier analogy, you can imagine separate accounts as different houses. You (Bitcoin user) receive all the mail (balance shown in Bitcoin). Mail goes to a postbox (address) at one of your houses (accounts).

The balance you see displayed is a total from all your accounts.


Bitcoin version 0.3.18 and later implements several RPC methods to maintain separate account balances in a single Bitcoin wallet. The accounts feature makes it easy to create web services that maintain a separate bitcoin balance for each customer.

Account Names

Accounts are named with arbitrary strings; you may use any JSON string (JSON strings are sent and returned as UTF-8 encoded Unicode). Note: at the time of this writing, it is expected that a future version of Bitcoin will not allow an account to be named *

Bitcoin creates two accounts automatically: it implicitly creates a default account with the empty string as its name, and it explicitly creates an account named Your Address when a new wallet is created.

The Default Account

The default account is named with the empty string ("" in JSON). Generated coins are always credited to the default account, and the sendtoaddress method always debits the default account.

Accounts and Receiving Addresses

Each account is associated with zero or more receiving addresses, and every receiving address is associated with exactly one account. Coins sent to a receiving address in the wallet are credited to the associated account.

Accounts are associated with receiving addresses by using the getaccountaddress, getnewaddress or setaccount methods.


getnewaddress always generates and returns a new address.




The sendfrom method sends coins and debits the specified account. It does **not** change Bitcoin's algorithm for selecting which coins in the wallet are sent-- you should think of the coins in the wallet as being mixed together when they are received. There is no way to ask Bitcoin to "create a payment transaction using the coins received from these previously received transactions."

The sendtoaddress method works like sendfrom, but always debits the default account.

The send will fail if the account has insufficient funds, with two exceptions:

 - Sends from the default account always succeed if there are sufficient funds in the server's wallet.  For example, if your wallet account balances were 100 BTC in account 'foo' and 0 BTC in the default account, then the balances after sendtoaddress 15VjRaDX9zpbA8LVnbrCAFzrVzN7ixHNsC 10.00 would be 100 in account 'foo' and -10.00 in the default account (and the overall server balance would go from 100 to 90 BTC).
 - The check for sufficient funds is done before paying transaction fees (if any); if a transaction fee is needed, and there are sufficient funds in the wallet, then the transaction fee will be paid and debited from the account.  For example, if account 'foo' contains 10 bitcoins, you sendfrom foo 15VjRaDX9zpbA8LVnbrCAFzrVzN7ixHNsC 10, and the transaction costs 0.01, 'foo's balance will be -0.01 bitcoins.

Account -> Account Transfers

Use the move method to transfer balances from one account to another. Moves from the default account to any other account always succeed; moves from any other account will fail if the account has insufficient funds. Moves are not broadcast to the network, and never incur transaction fees; they just adjust account balances in the wallet.

Account Balance and History

The getbalance method returns the bitcoin balance for either the entire wallet (if no argument is given) or for a particular account. The listtransactions <account> [N] method returns the last N (default 10) transactions that affected the account's balance.

Typical Uses

This section describes how typical web site code running on a web server uses the JSON-RPC api to keep track of customers' accounts.

  • Customer creates an account on the website: web server either assigns them a unique customer id number or uses their email address or other unique identifier, calls getaccountaddress "userid" and tells the customer to send to that address to fund their account.
  • Customer receives coins to fund their account: web server isn't involved.
  • Customer is shown their current balance: getbalance "userid" 1 to get their 'confirmed' balance, and subtracts it from getbalance "userid" 0 to get their 'unconfirmed' balance.
  • Show the customer a **itemized list** of transactions: listtransactions "userid"
  • Customer sends coins to another bitcoin address: sendfrom "userid" <address> <amount>
  • Customer transfers coins to another customer: move "userid1" "userid2" <amount>
  • You make a sale, paid for with bitcoins in the customer's account: move "userid" "" <amount> 6 "purchased item", and if it succeeds, send them the product.
  • Customer is charged a fee for use of the service: move "userid" "FEES" <amount> (using special accounts like "FEES" can make your application's logic much simpler)
  • Customer purchases bitcoins from you: move "AVAILABLE" "userid" <amount> (assuming the bitcoins you are selling are kept track of in an "AVAILABLE" account)