Bitcoin Forum

Hello, I only just checked in to the bitcoin world again to check on our coins, and I learn that Multibit is over and I should move to something newer, like Electrum.
With help from this forum, I seem to have moved our BTC to Electrum, using an older version of Electrum. It now shows our address but has been 'synchronising' for hours.

Does it need to finish synchronising to complete the migration? I do not like to keep it online for any longer than necessary.

My first question is ... am I now safely moved to Electrum, if it is showing our address on the send/receive window? It does not show a balance like Multibit used to. Blockchain.com shows the full balance that should be there, but it is not clear if I can still send funds.

Also, I feel I should be paying more attention to security; can anyone recommend a hardware key, like Keepkey or Ledger? I keep the laptop concerned offline most of the time. What is the risk?

I would greatly appreciate any wisdom from those who understand these matters, thank you.

Try clicking the little coloured bubble at the bottom right and select another server by left clicking it and selecting use as server. The server you're using might not be working.
Not really. If you know which are the addresses that contains the Bitcoins, you can just go to coinb.in/#newTransaction and create a new transactions from your addresses to another address. You will be given an unsigned transaction and you can simply go to Tools>Load transaction>From text and paste your raw unsigned transaction. Validate the information shown by Electrum and broadcast it on coinb.in/#broadcast. You can send it to your hardware wallet or whatever.
Its not fully synchronized yet but you can send funds.
Ledger is a decent hardware wallet if you are willing to pay the price. Otherwise, I trust my cheap little raspberry pi with Electrum on it.

Disconnecting your laptop doesn't help with anything at all. Malwares can still send information when it goes online. Once a computer has access to the internet, its security just decreases as opposed to another computer which has never been connected to the internet.

Thank you for your reply ... very helpful!

"Not really. If you know which are the addresses that contains the Bitcoins, you can just go to coinb.in/#newTransaction and create a new transactions from your addresses to another address. You will be given an unsigned transaction and you can simply go to Tools>Load transaction>From text and paste your raw unsigned transaction. Validate the information shown by Electrum and broadcast it on coinb.in/#broadcast. You can send it to your hardware wallet or whatever."

.... So does that mean the migration was not necessary? If I have the address, I can always recover the coins? Should I move the address to an up-to-date Electrum? I could install it on a raspberry?

I think migration was necessary. You need a client that's well supported and secure to perform transactions. Multibit's dead and Electrum's just about as robust and well-supported as it gets.

You can always recover if you have the private key and/or seed. The address alone isn't enough.

Always use the latest stable version - currently 3.2.3 - past versions have known vulnerabilities. I'd actually recommend sweeping everything to a new wallet. Just in case your old one's somehow compromised without you knowing. PLUS you can move to native Segwit, which is pretty and other good things =)

I hope you think on private keys, not BTC addresses - because you need private keys to send BTC from one address to another. If you only import address/es from MultiBit to Electrum you will get watch-only wallet (http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/coldstorage.html).

You did not specify whether it was MultiBit Classic or MultiBit HD wallet you use, there is a big difference between these two versions. From first you can only export private keys (which can be password protected), and from second HD version you only need seed since it is Hierarchical Deterministic wallet.

In any case you should forget MultiBit, it is dead project - and if you're looking for extra security I recommend you hardware wallets. Ledger is have winter promotion with 30% discount by the end of this month.

OK, first thanks for the replies here. Your support is appreciated!

Lucius asked which Multibit I was using, it was Multibit Classic.

I have successfully imported the original keys to Electrum, using an older version, 2.8.3 which is recommended elsewhere for this, as the current version did not seem to take the keys. The current version picked up the first Electrum wallet easily, but is still synchronising.

Electrum seems to be very basic, and does not show a balance like Multibit used to; is this because it has not fully synchronised?

I still have no certainty that I have control to send funds. Can anyone assure of this?

I have ordered a Ledger, but my next question is, how can I be certain that there is no hackable trace of my keys on this computer? I want to use it for other things!

In the meantime, if this computer is going to be online, how can I make it secure? I am tempted to export the keys and take them offline and delete all the bitcoin apps. Will this erase all hackable traces?

Thankyou in advance for any light you may be able to shed on my naive questions.

UPDATE ... the sync completed and the balance is shown in full ... so that is one question answered! Please feel free to offer your wisdom on my security ...

Thank you. I have experimented with taking the wallet file off the computer; surely then there is nothing to steal? Is this correct?

Can you provide a source for this? Old versions are insecure and buggy as you've found out yourself. The current version does let you import private keys. So overall this source needs to be corrected because they are encouraging people to do the wrong thing.

Regarding what you should do with your coins if you like you can delete the electrum wallet files or leave them be on your PC. It won't make a difference to your security since you did create the wallet on an online system. If you want greater security then try cold storage (http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/coldstorage.html) or multisig (https://bitcoinelectrum.com/creating-a-multisig-wallet/) setups.

I've had issues previously when trying to import private keys into one of the newer versions... in the end, I figured out you needed to specify the key type:
https://talkimg.com/images/2023/11/15/ziEFZ.png


However, I don't seem to be able to replicate this anymore... a quick test of the latest version (Electrum 3.2.3), seems to show that it will accept a key without the type prefix and just default to importing the private key as a P2PKH key.

So, I suspect the "source" that was recommending 2.8.3 had run into the same issue... which has since been fixed.

So you now have latest version of Electrum, your wallet is sync and you see your total amount of BTC - is that correct?


The only correct way to confirm that sending is working is to actually try send some coins and see is it working.

There was one problem before for some users when they are import private keys from MultiBit Classic to Electrum, and it happened to me. I import my private keys from MultiBit to Electrum, and at first everything seemed fine - but when I tried to make the first transaction Electrum is just freeze and stop to work. This has happened for the following reason:


I hope you do not have that problem, but some users who try to recover old wallets with a large number of transaction outputs may encounter this problem. However this was happening with versions under 3.0.0, so it is possible that something has changed in that regard.

http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/faq.html