[wallet] importprivkey: explicit rescan for known key #12701

1. 
   kallewoof commented at 0:51 am on March 16, 2018: member

   If you are importing several private keys into a wallet, you don’t want the rescan to trigger every time, so you might pass rescan=false to importprivkey. If you accidentally do this with the last key as well, you end up having to find a bogus private key to import, just to trigger the rescan process.

   This PR triggers a rescan for already known keys, iff the user passes an explicit true to the rescan argument (i.e. if third argument is not null and fRescan is set).

2. [wallet] importprivkey: explicit rescan for known key b78477821b
3. fanquake added the label Wallet on Mar 16, 2018
4. fanquake added the label RPC/REST/ZMQ on Mar 16, 2018
5. 
   sipa commented at 0:52 am on March 16, 2018: member

   Can we suggest people use importmulti instead?
6. 
   kallewoof commented at 0:53 am on March 16, 2018: member

   @sipa Yes, sure, but the same situation applies to one key if the user passes rescan=false and then later changes their mind. (And I didn’t realize importmulti existed until after I screwed up.)

   I guess the alternative is to add a rescan RPC command. Felt overkill though, but maybe better?

7. 
   sipa commented at 0:54 am on March 16, 2018: member

   @kallewoof Yes, but for importmulti you never need to set rescan=false. It’s both smarter and more selective, and will always rescan the relevant part of the chain only once.
8. 
   kallewoof commented at 0:56 am on March 16, 2018: member

   @sipa That’s cool, I didn’t realize it was that sophisticated. (And I didn’t realize it existed until I started digging into the code.)

   So… we should probably add a note to importprivkey to use importmulti for more than one key. I’ll make a separate PR for that now…

9. 
   promag commented at 0:58 am on March 16, 2018: member

   NACK.

   I guess the alternative is to add a rescan RPC command. Felt overkill though, but maybe better?

   There is already rescanblockchain.

   If you are importing several private keys into a wallet, you don’t want the rescan to trigger every time, so you might pass rescan=false to importprivkey

   That was the motivation behind importmulti IIRC.

10. 
    sipa commented at 1:00 am on March 16, 2018: member

    Also, if really necessary, you can already explicitly trigger a rescan using the rescanblockchain RPC. But in general I think we should encourage importmulti over manually letting users control rescanning - they shouldn’t need to care or know about it in an ideal world.
11. 
    kallewoof commented at 1:01 am on March 16, 2018: member

    I searched the code for RescanFromTime and couldn’t find anything. Didn’t realize we had rescanblockchain already. Closing.
12. kallewoof closed this on Mar 16, 2018

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13. kallewoof deleted the branch on Mar 16, 2018
14. MarcoFalke referenced this in commit dab0d6859b on Apr 4, 2018
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Contributors
kallewoof sipa promag

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Wallet RPC/REST/ZMQ