How to spend ether from multiple accounts?

Question

I would like to know how to send ether from multiple accounts. For example, suppose I have 3 accounts with 5 ether in each account, how do I send the total (15 ether) to an account in a single transaction? I'm asking because from what I understand the "from" parameter in "sendTransaction" only accepts a single account.

The reason I'm asking this is because I need to accept Ether payments in my system and I would like to generate a unique account for each deposit, but I'm not sure how to spend the Ether I receive without having to send multiple transactions.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is a fundamental difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum.

In Ethereum having multiple accounts is not like having multiple unspent transactions in Bitcoin, because each Ethereum account has it's own private key and a balance.

Therefore you would have to separately sign each payment from each account - in effect creating a separate transactions everytime.

There are two points that I see with this, the first is that with short block times, you are not penalised in terms of lost time if you are creating multiple payments, and the second is that the fees for each payment are applicable for each payment rather than one overall calculated fee.

If all the accounts were part of a multisig-ring payment this might work however, but it is not very flexible if you only wanted to use one account for something.

Answer 2

The reason I'm asking this is because I need to accept Ether payments in my system and I would like to generate a unique account for each deposit,

Don't put ether in raw accounts on a client node, treat a smart contract as an account holder and track the accounts in your smart contract. See multi-sig wallet and other examples on how to track multiple users.

When you wish to send ether, you are sending it from your smart contract, which is one transaction.

It's also more secure to keep ether this way. That's why the multi-sig wallet was invented.

[EDIT, further requirements from comments].

If you just want to track the balance by sender, you would do this in solidity (pseudo-code). If you want to track by customer ID hopefully that's obvious how to change the code.

struct Deposit {
    uint customer_id;
    uint value;
}
mapping (address => Deposit) depositers;
function deposit() { 
    depositsers[msg.sender].value = msg.value;
}

Answer 3

depends what you're trying to do. It is theoretically possible to do running on multiple geth instances...but I take it you likely don't want to do that. There is a fundamental difference between Bitcoin's transaction transfer and Ethereum's transaction transfer. For an article that goes further in depth look here:

https://medium.com/@ConsenSys/thoughts-on-utxo-by-vitalik-buterin-2bb782c67e53#.cioo9ab7g

but in the short of it, if you're operating off of one ethereum instance, you would need to execute the transactions sequentially from multiple accounts. There is nothing "multisig like" in this iteration of Ethereum...but there is talk of it happening come Serenity. Stay tuned.

Answer 4

No,

In Ethereum, all transactions have a single source and a single destination. The source must be a real account (the one where gas will be removed from). The destination can be a real account or a contract. If it's a contract, the contract code can generate transactions that will send ether to other accounts, other contracts or even can call other contracts in the same transaction.

May be what you should do is send the money to a single account or contract and then do a single transactions from there.

Answer 5

Easiest way to do this IMO is to Send/Forward incoming ( ur user/customer) payments to one account and bite the bullet on the (1 extra trans fee) At less than 1 cent usd its not a game breaker LOL