Bitcoin Forum

Hi, I read somewhere that every thing you do on electrum console is recorded and written to hard disk unencrypted. Is this TRUE?

I want to generate legacy seed and only way to do that currently is using electrum console (make_seed function)
So is it safe to generate say 24 words electrum seed using console and then use it? Am i at risk that my seed is written to the hard disk?

only commands that you enter are recorded not the output of those commands. also it'll generate a 12 word seed by default unless you pass in the nbits argument.

As mentioned by Abdussamad above, it's only the command that is recorded. The output isn't recorded.
You can simply open your wallet file using a text editor application and check what has been recorded. You will see your used commands under "qt-console-history" and you won't see the outputs.

It is worth mentioning that from Electrum version 4.0 the commands you enter in your console is no longer stored in a separate unencrypted file (called config). Instead they are stored as part of your wallet file and if your wallet file is already encrypted the command history would also be encrypted.

Respective commit: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/commit/2b52ee26e64b56b364e9dc3ed2150fceef925e08

Still though, I would clear the console every time you generate a seed there just to protect you from, you know, ridiculously easy to carry out screenshot attacks initiated by malware. Airgapping your computer is not enough to make you fully safe from this -  I mean you can't just assume the system is constantly free of malware, unless the amount of Bitcoin you're storing in there does not warrant that amount of paranoia.

Isn't that generating a seed on Electrum through commands will work in the offline machine?
Or needs internet because the command will send to servers/any nodes.

Just want to confirm currently I have a broken PC can't confirm it but if it's allowed to generate seed offline through command then this is the safer one.

Right. You don't need internet connection for that.


Servers have no role in generating the seed phrase.
  

Whether you want to generate the seed phrase through GUI or console, you can do that offline and it's not that generating the seed phrase using commands is safer.