Negative balance on an account

[wsmithston]

After playing around with the dash-cli for a while, I somehow ended up with an account that showed
a negative balance. Unfortunately, I didn't take note of all my steps and can't tell exactly what I did prior to getting the following output:

> cli listaccounts
{
"" : -0.20010000,
"first" : 0.00000000,
"zeroth" : 0.50000000
}
cli getaddressesbyaccount ""
[
"XtLnLbinnr8g39T7o2DkYWpHJRa8639wzA",
"XhbPC3g2HZ7Mgefd8NwZj2axkZjobrbZ3S"
]
> cli getaddressesbyaccount "zeroth"
[
"XsMp5xT3PxkREwScUVy7214TCQm3VgaSyQ",
"XmmM7FqJLT5MJK4VcKt3iCbEFNSWcHLnAn"
]
​

At this point the addresses in account "" had not yet been seen by the network, and XmmM7FqJLT5MJK4VcKt3iCbEFNSWcHLnAn had 0.5 DASH sitting in there. I decided to send 0.3 DASH to one of the addresses in "" to see what would happen to the balance and was rather surprised to see the following message:

> cli sendfrom "zeroth" "XtLnLbinnr8g39T7o2DkYWpHJRa8639wzA" 0.3
error: {"code":-4,"message":"Insufficient funds"}
​

I then decided to send less, 0.21 DASH to be exact.

> cli sendfrom "zeroth" "XtLnLbinnr8g39T7o2DkYWpHJRa8639wzA" 0.21
9cccefa2e5ad8b479fd0cc858a19c097d57b42891a8b30cfb450e69274659563​

Somehow this worked, but the balance shown on account "" doesn't agree with the blockchain since
XtLnLbinnr8g39T7o2DkYWpHJRa8639wzA has 0.21 DASH in there and I'm seeing:

> cli listaccounts
{
"" : 0.00990000,
"first" : 0.00000000,
"zeroth" : 0.29000000
}​

Would greatly appreciate it if someone could shed some light on what's happening here...
Am I wrong in my assumption that a balance should never show a negative value?

 

[UdjinM6]

That's basically how it was designed to work https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Accounts_explained
You should never rely on accounts and should always use your own DB if you build some service because "accounts" is a kind of very simplistic internal server DB that has almost nothing to do with blockchain. Most likely accounts will be removed completely in future versions of bitcoin.

 

[wsmithston]

That explains a lot.

[...]
You should never rely on accounts and should always use your own DB if you build some service because "accounts" is a kind of very simplistic internal server DB that has almost nothing to do with blockchain. [...]

This sounds like good advice. Thanks.