Bitcoin Forum

I bought Bitcoins and accidentally set the receiving address to only run for 24 hours. Is there a way to extend the receiving address? Thanks in advance

If you are using a noncustododial wallet, like Electrum, the time does not matter, you can receive bitcoin with the address at anytime you want.

But it is not good to be reusing address for privacy reasons.

Thanks for the quick reply I thought the bitcoins were gone

The address isn't “extended” by no means. You're referring to Electrum's invoice whose expiration can be set by this drop-down:


Addresses can be used anytime and never expire. You should just click on this text; it returns you this, which clarifies the situation:

I wanted to extend BlackHatCoiner's reply to make it a bit more "newbie-friendly".

The expiration date in electrum is basically for your internal accounting purposes. An address does not "expire", it's just electrum adding an expiration date to said address so it doesn't get re-used if it isn't expired.
As long as you keep the seed phrase, you won't lose your BTC...

I am having a really similar problem and I probably need step by step newbie guidance.
I did not think I was so bad at this, but it seems maybe I am.
I don't mind dropping a few quid for a helpful answer as I have lost a bit more than a few quid it seems.

I sent some BTC from Coinbase on Thursday last week but with only an hour window.
They then made me wait 3 days, well I chose that as I did not have my passport on me.
Now the channel has timed out and they are just saying that they sent it so it's not their problem.

One this that may be causing the issue is that my Electrum wallet is saying not connected and has a red dot in the bottom right.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

I'm assuming "channel" was a bad choice of word because Coinbase doesn't support Lightning Network.
If it is just that "Requests" in your "Receive" window, it is already explained by the 2 replies above yours.

Click on the red circle to open the Network window then go to Server tab and try choosing another Electrum node to connect to. Otherwise check your network connection and firewall and make sure you are connected to the internet and Electrum is not being blocked by your firewall.

So you're abroad?
It may be the ISP, if the solution above didn't work, try to change your DNS.
e.g.: into google's (8.8.8.8), cloudflare's (1.1.1.1) public DNS or others.

There are a couple of online tutorials about 'how to change your network's DNS'.

You can check and confirm if they sent the BTC to your Electrum wallet by just copying the address that you use from electrum and pasting it to any of these below.

- blockchair.com
- blockchain.com

If you see funds and transactions it means it sent to your wallet.

About Electrum if manually choosing a server doesn't work as suggested above just switch it back to automatically. Also, take note if you have an old version of Electrum lower than 3.3.4 you won't be able to connect to any server. So make sure that you install the latest version.

Have you been verified on Coinbase exchange before you withdraw coins to your own wallet address.
You don't need to have your passport all the time with you when you are making withdrawals.
It's much better to use decentralized exchange like Bisq so you won't have to wait for verification or for withdrawals.

You know that you can always restart your Electrum wallet and wait until green dot appears again, but you don't have to do this if you already copied/saved your address.
There is no need for keeping Electrum wallet opened all the time for days, and you can check transaction status in blockchain explorers like mempool.space.