Allow prematureWitness flag

[alex-miller-0]

I am using bcoin for a local regtest network and want to use segwit. Looks like this is blocked based on the block number of my chain by a prematureWitness flag.

Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a way to set this configuation in my bcoin.conf file, as all the Mempool options are transcribed here and prematureWitness isn't on them.

It would be nice if I could set this flag to true in a conf file.

[jonajosejg]

Hey man this might be irrelevant but there's a witness option in the wallet which will enable segwit in regtest mode. If that proves to not solve the segwit activation i can write a gist that'll enable segwit by default in regtest mode.

[bucko13]

This is a legacy from core which required 432 blocks to be mined before segwit activation on regtest (good article that mentions it here). Seems like it would be a good idea to either add this to configs though and possibly turn it on by default.

[alex-miller-0]

So the way I fixed this was:

1. Allowing premature-witness flag to be parsed (prematureWitness: this.config.bool('premature-witness') in lib/node/fullnode.js
2. Hardcoding the VERIFY_WITNESS flag to 1 in lib/script/common.js

Although this works, it seems pretty hacky and I'm not sure what the ramifications are of especially the second point.

My use case is simply broadcasting segwit transactions (pre-signed and built to hex); is there a way to do this without forking the codebase?

[bucko13]

Hey @alex-miller-0,
If you're on testnet or mainnet, and your wallet has been initialized with witness: true then you're good to go. If you're on regtest, once you've mined 432 blocks (which will happen in milliseconds on a new regtest chain), it will work the same way.

[alex-miller-0]

I'm actually building a very lightweight signing mechanism and can't use the bcoin wallet class. I'm only using bcoin to broadcast raw transactions via the RPC API.

[bucko13]

That's fine. I was just mentioning those as the two pre-requisites. If you're on regtest and the network has mined 432 blocks it should be accepted by the mempool. I've tested this on my own regtest setups and it works 👍

[pinheadmz]

addressed in #580

[pinheadmz]

@alex-miller-0 Check out recent merge of #676
In regtest, now SegWit is activated at genesis.