Steem shared accounts

Written by nkgokul | Published 2018/05/30
Tech Story Tags: blockchain | steem | steem-shared-accounts | multisig | steemit

TLDRvia the TL;DR App

Recently I wanted to start a shared Steem account with a partner. I was looking for options and came across Multisig. Multisig accounts are possible on Steem but the interface is not yet friendly. You can find more on this in the article below.

[piston] How to use it for multisignature accounts - Steemit_Since the most recent release of piston 0.3.3, you can use Steem's swiss army knife for multisig transactions. This…_steemit.com

We had a simple use-case and a non-technical user who had to use these tools. Doing multisig was a overkill for simple scenarios and transactions of low value. So considering the constraints in our case we came out with a simple approach.

Here is the description of our scenario

  1. One of the partners is a non-technical partner.
  2. The general day-to-day transaction are run by the partner who also handles the tech part of the project.
  3. We wanted a shared account but we wanted to make sure that if one of the parties looses his password it shouldn’t affect the shared account or the project.
  4. Each of the partner wanted to decide if he wanted to reinvest his shares of profits back into the project or not.
  5. Each of the partner wanted full access/control to his share of funds but the shared account wanted to leverage on the amount each was willing to invest in.

Based on these assumptions above we came out with the workflow below.

Considering that that Alice is the techy one, she would take care of creating the shared account and setting it up.

  1. Alice would create a new account for the partnership, she would ask Bob to create a new account for this partnership. Alice then creates the ALBO account.
  2. Alice and Bob would both Power Up and then transfer their share of Steem Power to ALBO Account.
  3. The Combine Steem Power accumulated in ALBO account is used for running the operations of the project.
  4. The rewards from the ALBO account are split as per the SteemPower donated(in the ratio of SPA:SPB) and is transferred to Alice and Bob’s account.
  5. For transparency’s sake the code/script splitting the rewards can be publicly hosted on github and CI can be integrated for this script.
  6. Once Alice and Bob receive their rewards they can either Power Up and lend the Steem Power back to the shared account or they can do whatever they wish to with it.
  7. If both agree they can use another common script to automate the power up and Steem Power delegation to the shared account.
  8. Any time they are not comfortable or want to exit the project they can cancel/reduce their Steem Power Delegation. This process takes seven days and hence gives the other party some time to plan how he can raise the required Steem Power.

What do you think? Will we be able to use this approach or do you foresee any issues in this approach. If you are using multisig or any other approach for shared accounts would be great if you can share the details. Looking forward to your inputs in the comments.

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Written by nkgokul | Inquisitive, student, teacher and a wanna be story teller. Working on https://learningpaths.io/
Published by HackerNoon on 2018/05/30