Adding keys to piston

In this tutorial, we learn how to add a private key to piston and enable its use for posting new content and upvoting existing posts. We here assume that you have already created an account via some other platform (e.g. steemit.com and that you are able to extract the private keys from there.

Piston comes with its own encrypted wallet to which keys need to be added:

piston addkey <posting-wif-key>

On first run, you will be asked to provide a new passphrase that you will need to provide every time you want to post on the Steem network. If you chose an empty password, your keys will be stored in plain text which allows automated posting but exposes your private key to your computer.

You can verify that the key has been installed properly and that it corresponds to some account by using

piston listkeys
piston listaccounts

A Brief Introduction to Keys

What is usually referred to as keys actually is a key pair. There is a private key and a public key. As the names indicate, the private key should be kept private, while the public key can be distributed to the public freely without any risk. It is important to understand that

• from the private key, the corresponding public key can be derived
• from the public key, the corresponding private key cannot be derived

That said, we would like to emphasise to keep private keys secure as they allow to access your accounts functionalities.

Account functionalities

In Steem, every account has four keys:

• owner key: This key has super-powers over your account and can change any key, including the owner key
• active key: This key has access over the funds of the account.
• posting key: This key can only post, comment, and vote and has no access to the accounts funds
• memo key: This key is merely used when using encrypted memos in a transfer

Next Step

Now that you have installed a key into piston, you can continue by reading these posts:

• Upvote a post

  piston read @xeroc/piston-cli-quickstart---voting
  

• Reply to this post

  piston read @xeroc/piston-cli-quickstart---reply