When do people need generate the public key

Question

In my understanding, one wallet has unique private key. Then one private key can generate many public keys.

My question are:

(1) In MultiChain, public keys are the same concept of public addresses.

(2) When do people need generate the public key? Is each public key used for every transaction?

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

Yes, each private/public key combinations corresponds to one public address as visible to everyone on the blockchain. Unlike Bitcoin Core, in general MultiChain doesn't create a new key/address for the change of every transaction, because that doesn't work well with the notion of per-address permissioning. But you can generate new addresses in the wallet using the getnewaddress API command.

Comments

Thanks for your reply. Based on that, may I confirm 3 things?
(1) In MultiChain, each wallet has one private key, one public key. According to the rules of create a MultiChain address (http://www.multichain.com/developers/address-format/), one public address will be generated.
(2) In MultiChain, it’s better for each wallet always keeps only one private key, one public key and one address, even for all transactions.
(3) If I generate new address in the wallet using the getnewaddress API command, the wallet still only has one private key, one public key, but more addresses?
Thank you very much.

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No, each address has a separate corresponding public and private key, so a MultiChain wallet can contain a large number of keys. There are "from" APIs which allow you to select which address/key to use for particular operations.

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Thanks for reply a lot. I have another question: how to generate different wallets in MultiChain, and generate many different addresses for one wallet.
If you know the answer, please help me. Thanks.