书名：Foundations of Blockchain
作者名：Koshik Raj
本章字数：270字
更新时间：2021-07-02 14:17:20

Blockchain wallets

A blockchain wallet is a piece of software that holds all the private keys owned by a particular user. While physical wallets hold hard cash, blockchain wallets hold all the private keys a user possesses, which will help the user claim assets that belong to them.

Wallets are a famous concept in cryptocurrency. A user holding the private key will be able to view their account balance when a transaction is recorded in the blockchain. Wallet nodes used in Bitcoin are called Simplified Payment Verification ( SPV) nodes.

A single wallet can store any number of keys, which means a node can have multiple destination addresses. These keys are created in two distinct ways: deterministically and non-deterministically.

A non-deterministic wallet is a collection of randomly created private keys that bear no relation to each other. Private keys created with these wallets are difficult to maintain because it is difficult to reconstruct the keys in the event that they are lost. So, every key in the wallet has to be backed up to prevent any loss that could take place in the event of a wallet failure.

A deterministic wallet is also called a seed wallet because all the keys in this wallet are derived from a single seed. All the keys can easily be reproduced just by accessing the seed. All the keys in a simple deterministic wallet are created by hashing a string and an incremental nonce. In the case of wallet failure, seed information alone is sufficient to recover the private keys, so there is no need to back up all the keys in the wallet.