How do you find addresses with balance with the seed?

Question

I'm trying to build a small C# client and use the C#-Api on Github. My problem is: With one seed I can generate millions of adresses. How do I find all addresses with balance when I type in my seed?

It seems to be like this:

1. type in seed
2. generate n addresses with starting index x
3. with every address ask for getbalances But: generating one new address takes 0.5 to 1.0sec

Is there another way? Maybe something like:

• get all addresses with balance.
• for every address I can check really fast that it belongs to my seed?

Answer 1

You don't need to generate million of addresses at least if your seed was use properly.

Normally, a wallet should use addresses one after the other by just incrementing by one the index of the previous address. It means that a transaction from address at index n exists if and only if a transaction at address n-1 exists.

So, what you should do is searching for a transaction at first address index, and if it exists, search for a transaction at next index, and you continue until you don't find a transaction at address with index X.

This strategy works fine, with 2 important restrictions :

1. seed should have been used properly, i.e. using index incrementally.
2. if a snapshot occurs, be sure to perform your search on a permanode (or keep locally the index of the last used index)