Cannot mine with encrypted wallet?

Question

Since I discovered this to be a problem in a previous post which made one of my chains inoperable I figure its best to create a new question. Is there a way to mine with an encrypted wallet without unlocking the wallet or is there some kind of work around? I see some information in bitcoin core about minting but its not clear how that works or if it will work with multichain. Is multichain going to change this in the future? If we cannot encrypt a wallet that is mining what is your recommendation for protecting the private key of a mining wallet?

Answer 1

That's right, mining requires nodes to sign the blocks generated, and that can't do this if the wallet is locked under encryption. There isn't currently an easy workaround for this - perhaps you can keep your important (non-mining) private keys outside the node wallet, use raw transactions, and pass the private keys in to the signrawtransaction API.