Bitcoin Forum

Hi all, i am not very tech savvy but i have had a go at trying to claim my Bitcoin Cash from BTC i had in my electrum wallet at the time of the fork

this is what i did:

moved all the BTC out of my electrum wallet
installed electron cash wallet on another computer
created a new wallet using the seed from my electrum wallet
waited for it to synchronize........

...i am still waitng

I am doing this on a mac with OS 10.13.2 High sierra
the electron cash version is  3.1.2

It seemed to accept the seed i entered but it just says 'synchronizing' in the bottom left hand corner and no history has appeared

It has been like this for around 20 hours now

Have i done something wrong?

Please keep any suggestions as simple as possible as i really am in over my head here

thanks very much for your time

Usually synchronization should happen within 1-5 minutes at max (5 mins if there are lots of transactions) since Electron Cash is an SPV wallet and it only downloads the block headers. Here are a couple of things you may want to do:

1) Sometimes the synchronization gets stuck, it's safe to restart electron cash and let it retry the synchronization.
2) The server it's synchronizing from may be slow or few blocks back or down. Change the electron cash servers. You'll find a green / red icon towards the bottom right. Click on it and manually select a server from the server list (You may have to uncheck select servers automatically before doing this). After this,
3) Try to ensure that your PC firewall, network firewall or antivirus/antimalware aren't blocking electron cash from accessing the servers.
4) If all of these still doesn't work, I suggest going to the electroncash app-data folder and deleting the blockchain_headers file from there. Don't delete the wallets folder or files in it.

brilliant!

restarting worked first time, thanks for telling me to do that, i was a little nervous

i have a couple of private keys from an old bitcoin core wallet as well

do i just go to

wallet>private keys>sweep

and then enter the private keys?

Also, any recommendations for claiming anything else? i think i can get some bitcoin gold as well

cheers

- Yes, you can either sweep your private keys or import them. Sweeping is suggested such that you can continue to use a single seed for your electron cash wallet, cause imported private key wallets may not have a seed. Also, just a reminder it would be good to ensure that you move all your Bitcoins on that old bitcoin core address / private key to a new address / wallet before sweeping / importing on Electron Cash.


- Currently I can only think of Bitcoin gold on the top of my head (I honestly am not sure about how legit it is, cause I haven't tried to check the funds on it myself). There are many other forks that pop-up every now and then. But always be vary of the clients for those forks that you install. Some of them may be malicious and can steal your funds from other wallets. Better to do all of these on an old private key without Bitcoins in it already on a Virtual machine or on an amnesic OS like TAILS without any persistant drives created to store your wallet informations.

You try to used PC run on window! for me! i thinks! electron cash sync very fast!
No more than three hours!
Hope you get BCH back!

ok, thanks for the advice, i think i will stick with Bitcoin cash for now and see how things develop with BCG

i will definitely take the precautions you recommend

many thanks!