importprivkey - Bitcoin RPC

importprivkey "privkey" ( "label" ) ( rescan )

Adds a private key (as returned by dumpprivkey) to your wallet. Requires a new wallet backup.

Arguments:
1. "privkey"          (string, required) The private key (see dumpprivkey)
2. "label"            (string, optional, default="") An optional label
3. rescan               (boolean, optional, default=true) Rescan the wallet for transactions

Note: This call can take minutes to complete if rescan is true, during that time, other rpc calls
may report that the imported key exists but related transactions are still missing, leading to temporarily incorrect/bogus balances and unspent outputs until rescan completes.

Examples:

Dump a private key
> bitcoin-cli dumpprivkey "myaddress"

Import the private key with rescan
> bitcoin-cli importprivkey "mykey"

Import using a label and without rescan
> bitcoin-cli importprivkey "mykey" "testing" false

Import using default blank label and without rescan
> bitcoin-cli importprivkey "mykey" "" false

As a JSON-RPC call
> curl --user myusername --data-binary '{"jsonrpc": "1.0", "id":"curltest", "method": "importprivkey", "params": ["mykey", "testing", false] }' -H 'content-type: text/plain;' http://127.0.0.1:8332/

          

This is a website, created out of frustration with uncomplete and outdated Bitcoin Core RPC documentation online.

It was inspired by ChainQuery, which seems to be abandoned. These docs are even simplier, so they can be regenerated by anyone.

Made by @karel_3d; license of the docs is MIT (see bitcoin repo), license of the scripts and webpage is also MIT ((C) 2018 Karel Bilek) (github repo)

Bitcoin version: 0.16.0.

Note that the RPC is from a regtest node (for completeness), so it includes some additional calls that a regular node doesn't have.