Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Merits 6 from 2 users
Re: bitcoin core v25 - set hdseed
by
achow101
on 27/12/2023, 22:50:48 UTC
⭐ Merited by o_e_l_e_o (4) ,ETFbitcoin (2)
The HD seed cannot be used in a descriptor as a seed. Using it in a descriptor as you have results in an address with the seed as the private key, not the seed as a seed and then doing derivation on it.

If you want to use the seed in a descriptor wallet, then you will need to compute the BIP 32 master key from it, then specify the derivation paths for deriving the child keys from that master key. Note that the seed is a BIP 32 seed (S in this diagram: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki#user-content-Master_key_generation), not a BIP 39 seed phrase or mnemonic.

In general, Bitcoin Core does not intend the seeds that it produces to be handled by people directly since they are incomplete information for restoring a wallet. You should instead be backing up entire wallet files and restoring them when you need to restore backups, rather than trying to find an individual component of the wallet.

If you insist on using the seed, you need to create a legacy wallet and use the sethdseed command. Then you will get the addresses that you expect. Then you should migrate that to a descriptor wallet. However, after migration, the seed will not be used by the wallet anymore. New descriptors are generated which essentially replace that seed.