What should you set as rpcpassword and rpcusername in BitCoin?

Question

Every example/tutorial looks the same:

rpcpassword=<somehashofsomesort> and rpcusername=rpcuser

They always use something like rpcuser, and some hash for the password. Why is it like this? Does it offer any advantage to break out of the shell and have your username and password be something you like?

In another place I found this:

#rpcuser=alice
#rpcpassword=DONT_USE_THIS_YOU_WILL_GET_ROBBED_8ak1gI25KFTvjovL3gAM967mies3E=

Does setting your username to alice cause you to no longer be anonymous, and that's why everyone has the same username?

Do I even need a username and password?

Answer 1

I suggest you don't use rpcuser and password if you don't need to. If you don't set them, Bitcoin Core will use a cookie in your .bitcoin directory as a mean to identify you.

Besides rpcuser and rpcpassword are deprecated now, you're supposed to use this python script to generate a password and copy the output in your config file like this : rpcauth=[user]:[long random string]

But once again, I suggest you don't use it if you don't need it.

As for the alice username, it's just a common placeholder name originally used in cryptography, "Alice" and "Bob" are the two parties that try to communicate, Eve is the passive eavedropper that tries to snoop on their private conversation and Mallory is the active attacker that tampers messages or disrupts communication. I think there's no harm using it as a rpcuser name though.