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We collected small transactions for one wallet for a whole year, we got 3000 transactions. But each time the wallet took longer to open, and at one point it just took 30 minutes to load. We decided to withdraw the money, somehow entered the password and he thought for 2 hours. We have restarted and updated it. And now the whole DOES NOT ANSWER window is written, not a single button is pressed, neither the menu, nor the coins - the window just hung. Please help, we have been working for a whole year and here is such a disaster.

As long as you have the seed phrase, your funds are safe.
So, do you still have it? (don't post it anywhere and don't send it to anyone)
If everything goes wrong, you could just uninstall Electrum, clear the datadir and restore your wallet using that seed phrase.

Perhaps there's something wrong done during the upgrade like the client still running in the background while the update is installing.
Or your device/PC cannot handle those 3000 transactions since Electrum isn't designed to hodl huge amount of transactions.

Please provide a screenshot of the issue since the error isn't common.
Also mention your system's specs.

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But (as a heads-up) you'll encounter a big problem when spending those transactions: the fee for spending a lot of inputs.
Since you got 3000 transaction, you can't spend those in one go (max of 100,000vB) and each of your outbound transaction would cost a lot of fee for having a large vsize.

Try to uninstall the wallet, then delete data in all associated directories^[1] (according to your device's OS).
(I'm not sure if it's also necessary to restart the device, it won't hurt to try that). Final step, you can install the latest version of electrum and restore the wallet.
Remember to back up your seedphrase/privkey before doing any of the above.

1. https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/faq.html#where-is-the-electrum-datadir-located

I too will recommend Electrum, it has been the best bitcoin SPV wallet. But before Electrum will fully synchronize all your transactions and display your the correct balance, it will take time. You just have to wait and make sure the Electrum fully synchronize with the blockchain.

He should backup seed phrase immediately after creating a wallet. Only what I will expect him to do is to check that the backup is the same as the one on his wallet. He may not do the backup and you are right, but I am just trying to point out something. To backup immediately after creating a wallet.

Electrum is not designed to handle a large number of transactions such as several thousand transactions, so if you are running a store with an average of thousands of transactions per month, it is better to consider another software.

I need someone to confirm this information, but I think that in the current situation, you may need to run your own electrum server, as some servers you are trying to connect to may have DoS-protection for more than 1,000 addresses requests.
https://electrumx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Or you can extract the private key of those addresses and include it in Bitcoin Core. ( get list addresses and then use this command)


Wait for someone else to confirm this information. :D

maybe you need to check your RAM. it is possible that your RAM has been consumed very much due to your electrum wallet activity.  ;)

Did you generate seed in Electrum wallet or somewhere else?
First make sure you have latest version of Electrum wallet and that your computer is free from any malware software.
If you have the seed words backup in safe place than you don't have to worry about anything, and you can also confirm amount of coins you have in blockchain explorer.
Windows OS can often create problems so I would suggest switching to good Linux OS, but there is one alternative for Electrum called Sparrow wallet so you can check if that works better for you.

Hello!  As for the screenshot, what's the point of doing it? Open your Electrum wallet and imagine that NO button in this window is pressed or responding. Generally! The window is just hanging! The balance is visible, the server light is green, everything looks fine. No keys, addresses, nothing to do - THE WINDOW IS HANGING!)  And it was also noticed that about 10 temporary files appeared in the folder for this particular wallet. And the total volume of the wallet is 78MB now.
As for the seed phrase, of course, everything is fine with it.
Electrum downloaded from the official website. Updated everywhere. Moreover, we restored the wallet on both Linux and Windows, on powerful laptops - USELESS! The electrum window just freezes.

Tell me how to add a screenshot here, I will attach.

Upload your screenshot on a website like Imgur, and then use the img code to post your image, or just share the link here since you're a newbie. Make sure you blackout any sensitive information (or never include it) before you upload your image, such as your address if privacy is an issue, and so on.

did you get any error messages or can you debug logs before it crashes? If the wallet does not show any abnormal behavior, then perhaps the problem is with your RAM. Are you sure that the correct balance appeared without any problems, or is the wallet still in sync?

use talkimg.com to upload image and paste the code, Imgur links may not work

Issues with Electrum freezing and not being able to handle massive transaction loads have been reported on the forum before. I am pretty sure it's the 3000 or so transactions that are causing the problems. I don't know if other light clients will be able to handle your wallet any better, especially if it's a native Electrum seed. You might need to consider importing your keys into Bitcoin Core and consolidate your transactions in batches. 

OP is a newbie. Regardless of the image host they use, they can't display the images on the forum. Both Imgur and talkimg would work fine for this purpose because all we need is the link to the screenshot without the img tags.

Unfortunately, Electrum is not the best app when it comes to handling wallets with huge number of transactions. Either be a bit more patient and give it more time to complete syncing or try importing your seed into another wallet that supports it (afaik BlueWallet does).
The good news is that your funds are safe.

Next time, make sure to consolidate your inputs regularly to avoid facing the same problem again.

I run a Fulcrum Electrum server on my RaspiBlitz Node and my Electrum wallets talk only to this Fulcrum Electrum server. I can open Electrum wallets with thousands of entries in the transaction history with ease, where electrs as Electrum server was a pain in the a...

Try to connect to different Electrum servers as the public ones are not always happy when your Electrum asks them for a response to a wallet's huge addresses history. You might find an Electrum server that will finally answer your requests within a reasonable amount of time.

Some public Electrum servers even punish huge requests with throttling.

Shutting down your non-responsive wallet might have causes corruption which further delays or confuses your Electrum. Consider to be more patient. By restauring your wallet from the mnemonic recovery words you should always be able to recreate your wallet fresh. With a fast and responsive Electrum server an address history of 3000+ entries shouldn't be a big deal.

For better privacy I recommend running your own Electrum server and in particular Fulcrum which has a considerably better performance than most smaller Electrum server implementations even on such weak devices as a Raspi.

I am sure that this problem is related to the synchronization so I guess you can keep waiting until the wallet syncs completely even if it takes a few hours and consolidate all the inputs into one or a few.

Did you try to restore the address on other wallets apart from electrum? As others mentioned you can go for bitcoin core but since you are talking about doing it on laptops then I suggest you to go with Running the node pruned so your wallet significantly reduces the storage space required to store the blockchain compared to a full node wallet.

Export that address private key and import it into Bitcoin Core.

OP did not know about consolidation. He must consolidate his inputs to reduce loading time and reduce size of his transactions in future. More inputs, bigger sizes and more transaction fee. Input consolidation should be made when mempools are good with cheap fee.

After a few months with expensive fee from Ordinals, mempools are good for consolidation
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),24h,weight

In your Electrum wallet: Wallet -> Private keys -> Export. To get your private key, choose CSV format for your export file.

In your Bitcoin Core wallet: Menu -> Console, type


You can label your addresses if you import more than one address. Use label and false.

To give a perspective of what Electrum is capable of here's some timings I recorded for one of my larger watch-only wallets (shouldn't make much of a difference if it's a watch-only or full wallet, at least I don't expect a reason).

My local Electrum server (Fulcrum) runs on a Raspi 4B 8GB RAM with a 1TB SSD and fetches data from a Bitcoin Core 24.0.1 daemon running on the same Raspi (RaspiBlitz with active LND with a few channels which keeps the Raspi busy, too). The Electrum wallets are opened on an "ancient" ThinkPad T520 with 8GB RAM, a 1TB SATA SSD running Ubuntu 22.04.02 LTS.

Watch-only wallet 1:

Size	121MB
Addresses	21954
Transactions	5693

Total loading time in Electrum 4.4.5 ~5m41s with fully responsive cursor; after ~4m45s address history was displayed with mostly responsive cursor and Electrum still syncing about 2k left addresses; first switch to address tab takes ~13s, switch back to address history ~8s until responsive again.


Imported private keys wallet 2:

Size	163MB
Addresses	57
Transactions	8125

Total loading time in Electrum 4.4.5 ~43s with fully responsive cursor; not much of a delay when switching tabs in Electrum.

Don't forget to specify the wallet type when suggesting that command because it wont work in default wallet of the new versions.
The default wallet type "Descriptor wallet" doesn't support importprivkey.

Also, in the case of multiple imports, on the last private key, remove "false" rescan flag in order to tell Bitcoin Core to rescan the blockchain.

He can't do this since the wallet is frozen (he said, "hung").
Instead, he can import the seed phrase on an air-gap Electrum so it wont try to sync (plus safety), then do your provided instructions there.

Or if there are only a couple of funded address(es), just go to 'Addresses' tab (View->Show Addresses) and export only the funded ones. (balance not displayed in the Air-gap Electrum)
Right-click and select "Private key" to get its private key.

3000 transactions in an electrum wallet will take way too long to process since all of that information is coming from an SPV one call at a time. You made the correct decision in sweeping all of these funds to another wallet (possibly Electrum).

You can also export the wallet without encryption using the Back Up option - do this on a secure computer, and then you can sign and broadcast the sweep without having to enter a password.

Run electrum with the -o flag to stop it from attempting to sync. Then export the private keys and import them into bitcoin core.

This is interesting, and another proof that the problem is in the servers and not in the software. I think 8 GB of RAM is suitable, so can you randomly try some of available servers? 3-5 servers to see if switching between servers will solve this problem or the user must run a full node.

I hope that one of the members to run a private electrum Bitcointalk server instead of those free servers that Chainalysis may spy on.

As you requested, I had some spare time for testing, I used my watch-only wallet with the 21954 distinctive addresses as test subject.

Electrum server		Sync time until responsive
fortress.qtornado.com:443		1m52s
2ex.digitaleveryware.com:50002		3m34s
bitcoin.lu.ke		1h8m12s	...arrgh, that was painful!
electrum.jochen-hoenicke.de:50006		1m28s
fulcrum.grey.pw:51002		1m25s
fulcrum.theuplink.net:50002		1m32s
fulcrum.tinsb.xyz:50002		1m27s

No particular issues were observed, the 2^nd server had a few "Server busy" sync restarts which I didn't observe on any of the other servers, even the snail slow server bitcoin.lu.ke sifted through the addresses in slow but steady pace. Still, this server won't see my wallet ever again.  :D

I know from past experience with other problematic "forensic" wallets and an electrs Electrum server in particular. If you have addresses with a very very large address history, like 5- to 6-figure transaction histories, you run into trouble because electrs can't send big enough data packets, at least I never figured out how to configure it that it doesn't choke on such large histories. electrs can be a pain when you do some blockchain forensics and stumble over "problematic" addresses.

So, in the case of the user, switching the server to another one will solve the problem? If this is true, then it is the best solution instead of the headache of extracting the private keys, including them in the BitcoinCore wallet, and waiting for the synchronization.

thanks for testing

If you use public Electrum servers the default setting is that your Electrum wallet connects to 8 arbitrarily chosen public Electrum servers. I don't know if those 8 public Electrum servers are queried in parallel or some sort of switching occurs when e.g. one server is only slowly responding.

If there's no syncing progress visible in your Electrum the first thing I would try is to choose some other Electrum server. Normaly this shouldn't be required but sometimes it is.

As I don't use any public servers, except for Testnet, I invoke my Electrum as follows:
replace "raspiblitz:50001:s" with "<your Electrum server name>:50001:s" if you have a local node with some other name in your LAN and there an Electrum server (usually electrs) that listens on port 50001 (:s for SSL connection, :t for unencrypted connection; SSL encryption isn't needed in your own LAN if you can trust all your LAN devices).

It connects to one server to download the transaction history from and up to 10 others to download block headers from. It cross verifies the information received from the servers to keep them all in check.