Better UX for specifying a pubkey when adding keys with the CLI

[shanev]

Summary

Adding a key via a pubkey requires the user to know internal details of how a key is specified.

Problem Definition

Currently, a pubkey is specified with:

gaiad keys add [name] --pubkey "{\"@type\":\"/cosmos.crypto.secp256k1.PubKey\",\"key\":\"AtObiFVE4s+9+RX5...\"}"

A user shouldn't have to read code and tests in order to figure this out (like I had to do) and manually enter escaped JSON into the command line.

Proposal

• Take in a bech32 pubkey by default, just as a string (like before)
• 99% of chains use secp256k1, so specifying the algo every single time doesn't make sense. It's safe to assume secp256k1 is the default.
• Use the --algo option for exceptions, and if it exists assume the pubkey is raw. Do the heavy lifting in code. Don't make the user do it.

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[ValarDragon]

I don't think the UX for this is ok imo, we can't have people dealing with escaping JSON for this.

At least for the next several months, you need to be using --pubkey for using multisigs. (Even the multisig UI works requires you to have made one tx from the multisig via CLI before you can use the CLI :/)

cc #10338 as well. Closed that issue in part because we found a hacky workaround via migrate commands, so didn't realize this is this painful.

Can we at least make it so its a bech32 encoding of the underlying pubkey bytes from the base64?

[jhernandezb]

This will be painful for multisigs, can at least provide documentation on how to migrate to that format?

[amaury1093]

It was decided to remove bech32 encoding of pubkeys, and in the issue linked by @ValarDragon to not restore it.

As a workaround we could:

• keep keys add --pubkey <JSON> like before (note: no need to avoid escaping JSON, --pubkey '{"key","value"}' works)
• and also add keys add --pubkey-base64 <base64>, which as @shanev proposed will create a secp256k1 pubkey by default, unless an --algo is specified
• error if both flags are passed at the same time

?