Use scantxoutset?

There’s a Bitcoin Core PR that proposes to add scantxoutset which returns UTXOs for a given xpub.

This is obviously less powerful than the current watch-only approach, because you’d lose transaction history. Though perhaps Electrum itself can hold on to the history?

[benma]

Thinking about this some more. I think this could be most useful for restoring from old backups without waiting for a rescan.

👍

It’s fine if this command is used to find the utxos and related transactions, and just include those in the history. Some of the tx history would be missing (related to spent coins), but that’s the trade-off with this command, and is acceptable.

Though sending fake/dummy transactions to trick electrum into behaving a certain way sounds hacky. Note that there are multiple wallets using the electrum protocol, which might not share the same behavior. It’s better to fix a sane api/protocol, and patch relevant issues upstream in Electrum.

[chris-belcher]

The server could also simply lie to the client and say the dummy transactions are unconfirmed. Then the Electrum client won’t ask for merkle proofs. And the users would still get information about amount and address. Electrum already doesn’t show the number of confirmations when a transaction is Not Verified.