How to get bitcoin P2SH (3*) address balance with bitcoind

Question

i'm trying to understand how to calculate/obtain balance of a P2SH address added to my running bitcoind with "addmultisigaddress..." and that is properly displayed by the command "getaddressesbyaccount" (it starts with 3* instead of 1*).

Now, i've created and spent a raw transaction to transfer some funds to that P2SH address, after a while I was able to find this transaction on blockexplorer.com and blockchain.info, so I can assume that funds are regularry transferred.

The problem is that I can't see those coins in my balance, also having more then 100 confirms (i'm using bitcoind v0.8.6). So I can imagine that bitcoind not recognize this transaction directly as mine via the blockchain (10GB+). Is there an alternative way not involving external services?

Thank you

Answer 1

The Core client will only update its balance when it registers transaction outputs that it is able to fully spend. So, if you don't have all of the multisig keys in your wallet, it won't keep track of the balance. What you're looking for is support for watch-only addresses, which should be coming soon (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/4045/commits), but is definitely not available in 0.8.6.

In short, without writing some custom scripting, there is no way to do this with the current Core client.