Bitcoin Forum

At the time of the Bitcoin Cash fork (Aug 1st, 2017, if I remember correctly) I had all my BTC stored in my Electrum wallet on my Windows laptop. In Oct 2017 I moved all my BTC from Electrum to another wallet on my laptop.

Now I'm want to claim my Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

So I exported all my private keys from my Electrum wallet. I'm mostly a newbie, so I'm thinking that one or more of those Electrum private keys correspond to the BTC I had in my Electrum wallet at the time of the fork.

* How do I determine which of the Electrum private key(s) correspond to the BTC I had in my Electrum wallet at the time of the fork?
* Or, am I on the wrong track and is there some other process for me to claim my BCH?

Thanks,

You have a couple of options:

1. You could just install ElectronCash (https://www.electroncash.org/#download).. then open your "old" Electrum wallet using Electron Cash... it should automatically find all your BCH.
2. You can just export ALL your BTC keys from your old wallet and import ALL of them into a BCH wallet (like ElectronCash)... It won't matter if you import "empty" ones...

If you want to just check it out to see what you're going to get... or you really only want to import the ones with coins, you could export the "xpub" from your old Electrum wallet... and then create a new watching wallet in ElectronCash using the xpub... it should find all your addresses that have BCH... you can then find the private keys that match the addresses with BCH.

Personally, I would say that there is no need for you to determine which key(s) had BTC and therefore have BCH on them... just import them all either by using the whole wallet file with ElectronCash, or importing all the exported keys into the BCH wallet of your choice.

Hello HCP,

Thanks for the clear guidance. I'll get to work on this and post results.

Cheers,

Hello HCP,

Worked great. I installed the ElectronCash wallet and then imported my old Electrum BTC wallet. Then my old BTC transaction history appeared in ElectronCash wallet. Nice.

For some reason, the ElectronCash wallet was smart enough to not import any transaction history after the fork. (After the fork I transferred all my BTC out of Electrum to another wallet.)

Now the ElectronCash wallet shows my correct balance before the fork. Cool. I was worried that wouldn't happen.

Thanks,

That is kind of the whole point of forks... different blockchains... and replay protection.

After the fork (with replay protection implemented, of course)... Transactions on one chain, are not valid on the other chain. So, there was no history on the BCH chain AFTER the fork block, unless you have specifically made a BCH transaction.

Without replay protection, it could potentially be a different story if someone was replaying transactions on both chains...

Ahh yes, I remember reading a little about replay attacks. That makes sense. Thanks.