unlocking an unspent vout with externally managed key

Question

Hi Multichain folks,

How do you unlock an unspent output in an address with an externally managed key?

Also, if an output is locked, can it still be sent using createrawtransaction?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Locking an output just means it won't be selected by that node as an input in the (common) case where the previous outputs aren't specified by an API's parameters. This has no meaning from the blockchain's global perspective and the output can still be used in createrawtransaction. Also you don't need the private key for an output in order to lock it, since it's just a rule applied on the individual node's level.

Comments

thanks Multichain, but I'm confused as in the Atomic Exchange transaction docs, it is mentioned that without a private key in the wallet, you cannot use preparelockunspentfrom

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Later on the same page is a tutorial for building atomic exchanges with external private keys.