Wallet signer doesn't accept a BigNumber for nonce.

[MicahZoltu]

The Ethereum protocol doesn't have a concept of small numbers vs big numbers, in its eyes everything is a big number, even if there is no reasonable expectation for a number to grow past 2^52. An example of this is the nonce, which is derived from https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/JSON-RPC#eth_gettransactioncount which returns a QUANTITY.

While I think this is stupid, ethers currently is mostly consistent about accepting BigNumber for any numeric parameter. The one exception I have found is in TransactionRequest when it asks for a nonce https://github.com/ethers-io/ethers.js/blob/master/src.ts/providers/abstract-provider.ts#L81.

For consistency, I recommend making this accept a BigNumber.

Alternatively, I could see value in doing a large scale refactoring of ethers that does ab etter job than the wire protocol at differentiating between different types, including small numbers, big numbers, addresses, hashes, byte arrays, etc. I have tackled this previously and it is a lot of work but I personally found it really paid off in making my code easier to maintain by giving me much more robust type checking (no longer accidentally passing an address to something that wanted a hash, or passing a hash to something that wanted a big number, or passing a big number to something that wanted a small number). This would be a very large undertaking, so for now I would be fine with the library simply being consistent and accepting BigNumber everywhere.

[ricmoo]

Ethers will already, for the most part, perform run-time checks on most parameters passed in, but you are correct. It makes sense to allow BigNumber as a parameter in a request. It will ensure it is a valid ieee 764 compact integer, but should be allowed.

[ricmoo]

This should work now in 4.0.19.

Thanks! :)