Bitcoin Forum

I lost my seed for my Electrum wallet 14 days ago, please don't ask me how. Today I found out that the google authenticator on my phone
dont pair with my Electrum wallet. I have a little under 40 bitcoin in there and just wanna know if there is anything I can do before
I write them off. I have the password for the account, but it seems kinda useless at this point and the wallet open on my cpu, but it asks for the authentication code which I don't have, because  I by error deleted the app on my phone. I was so stupid that I thought the authenticator was hooked up to my google account and was also very ill advised by the guy who helped me set up the wallet.
I know I have failed here and have learned it the hard way, so please don't needle me in your reply.

Thanks in advance if anybody can tell me they are gone so I can try to move on or if somebody by some miracle has clue how to get full access
to the wallet.

Do you still have the authenticator with the Electrum authentication inside ???

If you have and it is not working maybe you should try to sync your device's clock with the phone's network time. Worked for me once.

And I had no idea that you could put google authenticator in the Electrum wallet ???

I had the google authenticator on my phone, but me or my son by fault deleted the app on my phone and when I reinstalled the app it was not linked
to my wallet anymore... In hindsight, I should never have linked the authenticator to my wallet, but that is too late now.

move this topic to  Alternative clients > Electrum section here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=98.0
you might get a better response there.

as far as i know you have to have the seed if you don't have the 2fa.
check out the wiki: http://electrum.orain.org/wiki/Two-factor_authentication

but the google auth is bound to your account. use google, you can even print paper codes - if you got access to your google account.

edit: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1187538?hl=en

Paper codes only work for specific services, they will not work with Electrum / TrustedCoin 2fa.

If you've lost both your 2fa app (and have no backup of it) and your seed, you very likely out of luck, sorry...  :'(

but shouldn't you be able to just download the 2fa app under your google account? always thought that would be the backup function...

No there's no backup option, that's why people use authy these days.

oh really? thanks for the heads up... moving to authy then

That's why, it is highly recommend to store the secret key safely. Authy is good but as it backups to cloud, I don't like it much.

* Edited.

yeah, for other apps. my electrum is backupped in keepass2, no need for 2fa :)

+1 IMO....

I believe that the upcoming "Android M" will be fairly aggressive (for better or worse) in what it automatically backs up to the Google cloud, but as of today app data is not backed up by default.

Do you have any backups of your phone from after you had the Google authenticator token loaded onto your phone? If so then you might be able to restore from a backup.

When you really reinstalled 2fa on your phone and it shows your 2fa code for electrum then it should be impossible that its wrong when your phone has the correct time. Since the code it recreated should be the same.

Does the other 2FA or dont they work too?

And yes, back of secret key and backup of the backup. As well as backup of the password in keepass and backup of keepass. On top make a backup of electrum on different places. Next time...

What the shit do you mean? 2FA Google authenticator aren't google account OTPs

OP: how can you have $10k of Bitcoin without a backup of your TOTP base32 code / mnemonic seed etc? You say don't ask you how it happened: that's because you know what the answer is, nothing can be done

As long as it's not LastPass, sounds good. LastPass lost my account to their hack last week (EDIT: and another hack yesterday), with mtgox levels of tech support and competency all around, I'd advise no one use this service

We're getting off-topic ;), but I must respectfully disagree.

Any online service is vulnerable to attack, and by using one you are obligated to understand and accept this risk. I agree that a local password manager which doesn't require a centralized service is probably safer, but in exchange for that safety you must give up some convenience. More importantly, I think that LastPass is the best among the various online services, and I have no trouble trusting them with all but my most sensitive passwords.

In particular, they adhere to good security best-practices (salted well-key-stretched hashed passwords), and they have been, at least in the past (and including their most recent issue), very transparent when something bad happens or when they screw up. I also find their mitigation recommendations to be reasonable (when problems do occur), and not overly sugar-coated.

Anyways, just my 2¢.

An aside: was there another hack? I was only aware of one recent one (https://blog.lastpass.com/2015/06/lastpass-security-notice.html/)....

In the future, you may want to consider SuredBits (https://www.suredbits.com). We utilize nLockTime transactions to make it impossible for you to lose your bitcoins in these situations. PM me if you have any questions.

Interesting idea. So you create a transaction that has a timestamp as to when the transaction will happen? You dont get the private key because the transaction will be placed in the users wallet. Though you need to use the official wallet in order to use the service since only few wallets allow to import a transaction, i believe.

I didnt know that you can make a timestamp to a transaction that prevents that its run before.

Though... you need to know and protect the private keys of the destination wallet.

No offence but GreenAddress is more trusted than yours and has been online for a long time. So personally, I would go for it. https://greenaddress.it/

We're still in our early stages so yes, we are not as well known in the space yet. However, we are legitimate. We just finished Boost.VC's accelerator (Tribe 5) and we won't we going anywhere so expect to see more of us :)

I also just want to point out that we are not a wallet provider like GreenAddress. We are an easy-to-use platform to create nLockTime transactions.

By the look of it, you want to 'lock' coins. Using nLockTime won't prevent coins from spending. You should use OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY for improving safety. Anyway, current setup does not help in preventing theft but it does help in scenarios like this because you can create an nLockTime transaction to spend from any address which will be included in a block later. Even if a person looses his/her private key, he/she can still get those coins. Only problem I can see is that we need to trust you with our money. I hope you will find a way to avoid it.

To be fair, GreenAddress is an online wallet but yours is more like a 'tool'.