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coin-selection.adoc

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Coin selection

See Bitcoin Optech for more information on coin selection. There is a section digging deeper into the coin selection code found below. To select inputs to a transaction our primary considerations are privacy and fees.

The below sections form an overview of creating a transaction via CreateTransactionInternal().

AvailableCoins()

The gist of how we generate a list of coins available to spend (via AvailableCoins()) is that we iterate mapWallet and check for coins that:

  • Are not immature coinbase outputs

  • Are not conflicted

  • Must be at least in our mempool

  • Not currently replacing or being replaced by another transaction

  • Are not locked

  • Are IsMine

  • Are spendable

…​and return them as a std::vector<COutput>.

GroupOutputs()

Once we have this vector of coins GroupOutputs() will turn them into OutputGroups. An OutputGroup consists of outputs with the same script, i.e. "coins sent to the same address".

selectCoins()

If you manually choose inputs, it will add outputs to the transaction automatically. It tries first to make sure that all outputs selected have 6 confirmations, if unsuccessful it then tries again with 1 confirmation as the lower bound.

For change outputs it starts with 1 confirmation and then again with 0. If this is still unsuccessful it increases the number of ancestors and descendants that unconfirmed change can have.

AttemptSelection()

This function is orchestrating the Output group creation, and then the coin selection. Currently, this is always based on the waste metric.

It is using 3 algorithms and then selecting the "best" of the three (based on the waste metric):

  1. Branch n bound (bnb)

  2. Knapsack

  3. Single Random Draw (SRD)

There is currently an idea that a limited SRD could replace Knapsack in the future. Due to this plan for removal, it would not make sense to focus development effort on improving the Knapsack algorithm at this time.