Author: Jochen Hoenicke 2016-08-24 14:42:25
Published on: 2016-08-24T14:42:25+00:00
On August 24, 2016, Jonas Schnelli raised a concern about the BIP44 Gap Limits in bitcoin-dev. The BIP states that the address gap limit is set to 20, meaning that if 20 unused addresses are found in a row, the software stops searching for used addresses beyond that point. Jochen clarified that this does not require a transaction rescan back to the genesis block every 20 addresses. Instead, one can start scanning sequentially from the genesis block or a block at around the time when BIP44 was written. If a new transaction requires generating new addresses, they can be generated and scanned further from that point on. This process enables scanning in a single pass and allows for changing the set of addresses on the fly.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T19:50:17.905610+00:00