getnewaddress and watch-only addresses (importaddress)

Question

I am aware it is possible to use "importaddress" to import bitcoin addresses without their associated private keys.

For an online shop that uses "getnewaddress" in order to present a customer with an address, is it possible for "getnewaddress" to only ever serve up "watch-only" addresses?

Ie - I do not want the Bitcoin core wallet to create new addresses. I want to use "importaddress" to import 10k watch-only addresses.

Is the above possible? And, if so, what is the expected behaviour of "getnewaddress" in the event of all 10k watch-only addresses being used up?

Answer 1

I don't thing your approach makes sense. Why would you importaddress as watch only and give them out over getnewaddress? Do you try to missuse bitcoind as a address database (importaddress = store | getnewaddress = retrieve)?

If you need endless amounts of addresses, you probably like to switch to Bip32 (a.k.a HDWallets). There is a experimental patch for bitcoin-core (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6265) which would allow you to call hdgetaddress without having the master seed (private key) in the wallet.

Answer 2

There are libraries out there built upon bitcoind. These libraries pull with 'getnewaddress'. However, bitcoind will automatically generate new keys once the keypool is exhausted. I was attempting to avoid having private keys on the server.

Another method could be to regularly sweep incoming funds..

Answer 3

I was attempting to use an existing script which requests "getnewaddress" from bitcoind when it wants a new address. Sure, I could pre-generate keys.. but this script has no method to store them. It relies upon bitcoind. However, this means that the private keys are stored on the bitcoind server. I was attempting to avoid this.

Is this not a valid scenario I am describing ?