Bitcoin core HD wallet

[curiosity81]

Hello,

Is it possible to create a new HD-wallet with bitcoin-core providing a master key from another bitcoin-core HD-Wallet (which, for instance, was lost, but the seed is known)?

What I found via google is, that it is not possible to import some xprv into an HD-wallet. Which makes sense, since the wallet already contains a seed. Nevertheless, another possibility would be, to create a new HD-wallet with the known key as seed.

Is this possible? And if this is possible, which version of bitcoin-core supports this functionality?

Last question: the seed looks like a 512bit number, right? Is it simply a 512bit random number?

Thanks in advance
cu

[curiosity81]

Guys, I am really disappointed!

Is the only reason that bitcoin core introduced HD-wallets, to have no 100 keypair limit anymore? This is too little! Who uses bitcoin core? Not the guy from the street! It is used by the more experienced people. And those know about the limit.

What is so difficult to have an additional command line parameter like "-walletseed <some hex integer>"? Then one could generate its own seeds via some USEFUL method, some method that is suitable for long term archiving. To further stress this: Modern storage media are NOT an alternative!!! And I won't mess around with the bitcoin core source code, even though, it seems to be a no-brainer to add this functionallity.

Please add this simple feature to bitcoin core.

(Moreover, I do not like BIP32. Too complex for simple needs.)

[pereira4]

Doesn't the HD format in Bitcoin Core's wallet.dat avoid ever showing the seed for security purposes? (therefore you can't also enter any seeds)

What's the difference from the HD wallet to the non wallet? I still have the old wallet which doesn't have "HD" icon enabled...

Other than to not have the 100 keypair limit, does it provide any other advantages? (or disadvantages) compared to the old non HD wallet?

[HCP]

Doesn't the HD format in Bitcoin Core's wallet.dat avoid ever showing the seed for security purposes? (therefore you can't also enter any seeds)

What's the difference from the HD wallet to the non wallet? I still have the old wallet which doesn't have "HD" icon enabled...

Other than to not have the 100 keypair limit, does it provide any other advantages? (or disadvantages) compared to the old non HD wallet?

I believe the newer versions of "non-HD" wallets will actually run a keypool of 1000

Anyway, advantages of HD include only ever needing to take one backup... you do actually get the "master private key" if you dumpwallet, so theoretically, you could write that down and store it offline and then be able to recover your entire wallet by importing that into a compatible wallet.

However, in the limited testing that I did, with the "seed changes on password change" system... if you change the password (or set one)... the OLD master private key is not stored... only the addresses

Also, I guess having an HD wallet would make it easier to use your wallet from multiple locations and not need to worry about it generating different addresses? (assuming you don't change the encryption password! ) It probably makes creating "watching only" wallets easier too...

Whether or not you consider any of these advantageous is really dependent on your particular use cases.