Accounts

Accounts on Ethereum are either wallet addresses or smart contract addresses. They look like 0x71c7656ec7ab88b098defb751b7401b5f6d8976f and they're what you use for sending ETH to another user and also are used for referring to a smart contract on the blockchain when needing to interact with it. They are unique and are derived from a private key. We'll go more in depth into private/public key pairs in later sections.

In order to use account addresses with go-ethereum, you must first convert them to the go-ethereum common.Address type.

address := common.HexToAddress("0x71c7656ec7ab88b098defb751b7401b5f6d8976f")

fmt.Println(address.Hex()) // 0x71C7656EC7ab88b098defB751B7401B5f6d8976F

Pretty much you'd use this type anywhere you'd pass an ethereum address to methods from go-ethereum. Now that you know the basics of accounts and addresses, let's learn how to retrieve the ETH account balance in the next section.

Full code

address.go

package main

import (
    "fmt"

    "github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/common"
)

func main() {
    address := common.HexToAddress("0x71c7656ec7ab88b098defb751b7401b5f6d8976f")

    fmt.Println(address.Hex())        // 0x71C7656EC7ab88b098defB751B7401B5f6d8976F
    fmt.Println(address.Hash().Hex()) // 0x00000000000000000000000071c7656ec7ab88b098defb751b7401b5f6d8976f
    fmt.Println(address.Bytes())      // [113 199 101 110 199 171 136 176 152 222 251 117 27 116 1 181 246 216 151 111]
}