Bitcoin Forum

I've been around the block with Bitcoin and have always used blockchain.info to store my funds. I grow increasingly paranoid, though and am moving to a desktop client. My choice is Electrum because of its security and lack of needing to download the blockchain. I just have a few questions first.

-Does Electrum require my password to send funds to another address? (I don't want my family to be able to access my Bitcoins.)
-Can I do cold storage?
-Is Electrum really a safe client to use? (Up to like 5 BTC)
-Is my wallet secure?

If anyone can answer my questions, it would be greatly appreciated.  :) :) :)

Yes, you set a password as part of the wallet creation process and that is required to spend bitcoins. However, there is no restriction on viewing transactions or the wallet balance.


Yes, but you may want to get familiar with hot storage, if I were to coin a phrase, first. When you are comfortable with that you can try cold storage:

https://electrum.org/tutorials.html#offline-mpk

Cold storage is not for noobs. Not just noobs to bitcoin. But also noobs to electrum. At the very least you need to know the difference between wallet seed, password and master public key (the answers are in the docs on that site).


Yep.


It's as secure as the rest of your computer. Don't download and install crap. Keep the OS up to date, install an anti-virus and keep that up to date , make sure you have a firewall etc.

Thanks for the help. I'll go ahead and start using Electrum.

Once you get comfortable with electrum, I think you'll find
the cold storage system fairly easy to use.

But you still need to follow best practices and principles
of cold storage.  (A true cold storage machine is one
that has never been online and never will be).