Generate segwit address in receive payment tab?

[mb300sd]

Now that segwit is active, should there be a check box added so the request payment button generates a segwit address? Perhaps a flag on getnewaddress as well, but it's not that inconvenient to call addwitnessaddress if you're already using CLI.

[laanwj]

Yes, this should become possible.

An option to make the change address SegWit when you send a transaction would also be nice.

[Sjors]

I noticed addwitnessaddress happily produces a SegWit address even if its private key has a 'legacy' address with funds.

This seems unsafe to me for two reasons:

1. privacy wise: when the output of both are spent, anyone can see it's the same public key and learn the addresses have the same owner
2. if only one is spent, the public key is known, so you lose the protection of the public key hash

Would it be better if the UI always creates a new address?

I agree with @cedenday regarding change addresses. Out of scope perhaps, but it might be useful to have a wallet setting "use SegWit". This would cause new (change and receive) addresses to be SegWit by default.

BIP 49 uses different private keys for SegWit vs. non-SegWit addresses. But BIP 44 is a prerequisite for that. See also bitcoin/bips#456 (comment)

[sipa]

The UI and RPC interface should of course always generate a new key. addwitnessaddress is a temporary approach to facilitate testing.

[justnonamenoname]

why not to create segwit by default without any checkboxes?

Apparently some people don't want to.

I think @luke-jr only wants to use it for lightning.

[luke-jr]

FWIW, I think the default should probably be to create a segwit address (provided the wallet loaded is of sufficient version). While I do support avoiding using segwit unnecessarily at this time, that should be the decision of the user, and using segwit by default makes sense here.

[CydeWeys]

Any updates on this? I would love to be able to start using segwit. I've been using Bitcoin Core for over six years (since it was just "Bitcoin"), and I would hate to have to switch to another client, but segwit is a really important feature that I want to use now.

[sipa]

Planned for the next major release.

[CydeWeys]

Awesome, I'm looking forward to it. Is there a rough release date planned for that yet? Are we talking a month? Many months?

[dooglus]

@CydeWeys > I would love to be able to start using segwit.

You can already. Get a new receiving address as you would normally, then do:

Help > Debug Window > Console > addwitnessaddress <address>

That will give you a SegWit address (beginning with a 3) that you can give to the person who is going to pay you.

It's not as convenient as it could be, but if you're in a hurry to start using SegWit, it works.

[janmande]

I have chosen this as my first attempt at getting to know, and contributing, to the bitcoin project, but would like some input on how to go about it.

rpcwallet.cpp contains the local class Witnessifier that adds a witness script to an address and is used by the addwitnessaddress function.

My idea is to add a new function in AddressTableModel called addWitnessRow that behaves the same way as addRow, but uses the Witnessifier class to add the witness script to the address. Is there a reason why Witnessifier class is not exposed in wallet.h which AddressTableModel allready depends on?

[meshcollider]

@janmande, @sipa has already taken this under his wing, but thank you for your interest in helping, there are plenty more issues to claim as a first contribution :)