Wallet Class Structure Changes

Preface

This describes the wallet class structure changes that were discussed at CoreDev Amsterdam. A transcript of most of this discussion can be found here.

The New Structure

The wallet is currently structured as a monolith. The CWallet class contains basically everything in the wallet - address generation, key generation, signing, transaction tracking, determining whether a transaction belongs to it, etc. The goal of this change will be to break out the address generation, key generation, signing, and ismine parts into a separate "box" within the wallet. This "box" will provide a standard interface for address generation, key fetching (for signing) and determining ismine and CWallet can have one or more of these boxes for the various address types. Each box's internal implementation can vary which allows us to create one for the current wallet behavior and one for native descriptor wallets without requiring other significant changes to CWallet. This will also allow for future expandability

The "box"

Within every CWallet, there will be one or more boxes, also called SPKManager (short for scriptPubKey Manager). SPKManager will extend the SigningProvider interface and thus be able to be passed into ProduceSignature in order to sign transactions. There will be additional functions added to it that allow for address fetching (e.g. GetNewAddress()). Each SPKManager will also have it's own IsMine() function to determine whether a CTxOut belongs to that SPKManager (and thus the wallet itself). Each SPKManager maintains which address type(s) it can return and will respond accordingly to GetNewAddress() calls.

CWallet changes

CWallet will no loner handle keys, addresses, and IsMine directly. Instead it will contain one or more SPKManagers with a map of address types to SPKManager. When a new address is being requested, the SPKManager for that type is retrieved and a new address fetched from it. IsMine will be moved to be part of SPKManager so wallets will call IsMine for each of its SPKManagers to determine whether a transaction belongs to it. For signing, SPKManager will be passed into ProduceSignature as the SigningProvider to be used there. In order to determine which SPKManger to use when signing, the wallet will go through each of the SPKManagers it has and find the one which returns IsMine = True for a scriptPubKey. The SPKManager that does will be the one used for signing.

Prerequisites

IsMine

Before this new class structure can be implemented, some things need to be moved around and changed. IsMine is currently a standalone module because it is used in a couple of non-wallet tests. However it needs to be moved to be part of the wallet module first, possibly as a member function of CWallet. Once SPKManger is introduced, IsMine will become a member function if that.

CWallet Subclass Stack

The inheritance chain from SigningProvider should be condensed and the scopes slightly changed. The chain currently is:

SigningProvider -> CKeyStore -> CBasicKeyStore -> CCryptoKeyStore -> CWallet

Instead, CWallet will need to be standalone and SPKManager will be a SigningProvider; there is no need for CWallet to be a SigningProvider. Additionally CKeyStore, CBasicKeyStore, and CCryptoKeyStore are largely unnecessary. CKeyStore can be removed and it's functionality split into SigningProvider and CBasicKeyStore. The Add* functions can go up to CBasicKeyStore while the Have* go down to SigningProvider. The watch only related functions should go to CWallet and CBasicKeyStore can be renamed to another type of SigngingProvider. Lastly, CCryptoKeyStore should be entirely combined with CWallet. At the end of this refactoring, the stack will be:

SigningProvider -> CBasicKeyStore (renamed) -> CWallet

Combined with the addition of SPKManager, CWallet will be standalone and SPKManager will extend CBasicKeyStore (renamed).