The first thing you’ll need to do anything on the HC Net is an account. Accounts hold all your money inside HC Net and allow you to send and receive payments—in fact, pretty much everything in HC Net is in some way tied to an account.
Every HC Net account has a public key and a secret seed. HC Net uses public key cryptography to ensure that every transaction is secure. The public key is always safe to share—other people need it to identify your account and verify that you authorized a transaction. The seed, however, is private information that proves you own your account. You should never share the seed with anyone. It’s kind of like the combination to a lock—anyone who knows the combination can open the lock. In the same way, anyone who knows your account’s seed can control your account.
If you’re familiar with public key cryptography, you might be wondering how the seed differs from a private key. The seed is actually the single secret piece of data that is used to generate both the public and private key for your account. HC Net’s tools use the seed instead of the private key for convenience: To have full access to an account, you only need to provide a seed instead of both a public key and a private key.[1]
Because the seed must be kept secret, the first step in creating an account is creating your own seed and key—when you finally create the account, you’ll send only the public key to a HC Net server. You can generate the seed and key with the following command:
Generating Keys
// create a completely new and unique pair of keys
// see more about KeyPair objects:
var pair = HCNetSdk.Keypair.random();
pair.secret();
// SDK7YJSSHNEU3XES4D2CT6Q3EPCC7W2QZLHKO4HUTJYWTOGIQVQRLZD3
pair.publicKey();
// GADFH73HAAAZG7QKYM5K45JSKL3RT3FQGKGNNT6LCWB4CJVS5EPDNLOA
// create a completely new and unique pair of keys.
// see more about KeyPair objects:
import org.HCNet.sdk.KeyPair;
KeyPair pair = KeyPair.random();
System.out.println(new String(pair.getSecretSeed()));
// SDK7YJSSHNEU3XES4D2CT6Q3EPCC7W2QZLHKO4HUTJYWTOGIQVQRLZD3
System.out.println(pair.getAccountId());
// GADFH73HAAAZG7QKYM5K45JSKL3RT3FQGKGNNT6LCWB4CJVS5EPDNLOA
package main
import (
"log"
"github.com/HCNet/go/keypair"
)
func main() {
pair, err := keypair.Random()
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
log.Println(pair.Seed())
// GADFH73HAAAZG7QKYM5K45JSKL3RT3FQGKGNNT6LCWB4CJVS5EPDNLOA
log.Println(pair.Address())
// GADFH73HAAAZG7QKYM5K45JSKL3RT3FQGKGNNT6LCWB4CJVS5EPDNLOA
}
Now that you have a seed and public key, you can create an account. In order to prevent people from making a huge number of unnecessary accounts, each account must have a minimum balance of 1 HCX ( HCX are the built-in currency of the HC Net).[2] Since you don’t yet have any HCX, though, you can’t pay for an account. In the real world, you’ll usually pay an exchange that sells HCX in order to create a new account.[3] On HC Net’s test network, however, you can ask Friendbot, our friendly robot with a very fat wallet, to create an account for you.
To create a test account, send Friendbot the public key you created. It’ll create and fund a new account using that public key as the account ID.
Creating a test account
// The SDK does not have tools for creating test accounts, so you'll have to
// make your own HTTP request.
var request = require('request');
request.get({
qs: { addr: pair.publicKey() },
json: true
}, function(error, response, body) {
if (error || response.statusCode !== 200) {
console.error('ERROR!', error || body);
}
else {
console.log('SUCCESS! You have a new account :)\n', body);
}
});
// The SDK does not have tools for creating test accounts, so you'll have to
// make your own HTTP request.
import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
String friendbotUrl = String .format(
pair.getAccountId());
InputStream response =new URL(friendbotUrl).openStream();
String body = new Scanner(response, "UTF-8").useDelimiter("\\A").next();
System.out.println("SUCCESS! You have a new account :)\n" + body);
package main
import (
"net/http"
"io/ioutil"
"log"
"fmt"
)
func main() {
// pair is the pair that was generated from previous example, or create a pair based on
// existing keys.
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
defer resp.Body.Close()
body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(resp.Body)
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
fmt.Println(string(body))
}
Now for the last step: Getting the account’s details and checking its balance. Accounts can carry multiple balances—one for each type of currency they hold.
Getting account details
// The SDK does not have tools for creating test accounts, so you'll have to
// make your own HTTP request.
var request = require('request');
request.get({
qs: { addr: pair.publicKey() },
json: true
}, function(error, response, body) {
if (error || response.statusCode !== 200) {
console.error('ERROR!', error || body);
}
else {
console.log('SUCCESS! You have a new account :)\n', body);
}
});
import org.HCNet.sdk.Server;
import org.HCNet.sdk.responses.AccountResponse;
Server server =new Server("https://network.paybito.com/");
AccountResponse account = server.accounts().account(pair);
System.out.println("Balances for account " + pair.getAccountId());
for (AccountResponse.Balance balance : account.getBalances()) {
System.out.println(String.format(
"Type: %s, Code: %s, Balance: %s",
balance.getAssetType(),
balance.getAssetCode(),
balance.getBalance()));
}
package main
import (
"fmt"
"log"
)
func main() {
account, err :=
aurora.DefaultTestNetClient.LoadAccount(pair.Address())
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
fmt.Println("Balances for account:", pair.Address())
for _, balance := range account.Balances {
log.Println(balance)
}
}
Now that you’ve got an account, you can start sending and receiving payments.