Topic: what's the benefit of keypoolrefill rpc method ? (Read 1526 times)

Read this answer from theymos

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/32760

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Most people don't need to use keypoolrefill.

Bitcoin Core tries to fill the keypool to its configured maximum size whenever you take an address from the keypool. (It does not wait until the keypool is empty before regenerating it.) However, it isn't possible to add keys to the keypool unless the wallet is unlocked with walletpassphrase. So if you call getnewaddress 100 times (by default), your keypool will be empty and you will be prompted to unlock your wallet and run keypoolrefill. The same effect could be achieved by unlocking your wallet and then generating another address, which will also cause the keypool to be topped up.

Another use is if you want to temporarily increase the size of your keypool. For example, a really safe way of doing payment processing is to generate an encrypted wallet with a strong passphrase, generate thousands of keys using keypoolrefill 10000 or whatever, put this wallet on the live payment processing server, but only use the commands that don't require unlocking the wallet. Then even if the live server is compromised, the attacker can't steal the money because he can't unlock the wallet. This is similar to the idea of a watch-only wallet. You could do the same thing with the keypool setting, but I guess that restarting Bitcoin Core might be inconvenient in some cases.

Running Bitcoin with -keypool=0 and then only manually adjusting the keypool with keypoolresize might also be useful for some backup strategies, or if you have multiple servers using the same wallet (which is not recommended, but maybe possible if you're really careful).


Regards

i guess it refills automatically when it chooses to. keypoolrefill tells it to do it now 

As far as i know that key pool get refilled automatically every time new address is taken out of it, so what's the benefit of keypoolrefill method ?