thanks for the answer but i am trying to install Electrum on an offline computer which means i can not use the "apt-get" to just download it directly.
i have to move the tar file to that system with a USB or something like that.
apt doesn't install tar files. what you should do is go online, install the dependencies, grab the tarball and signature or copy it from the removable drive. verify the tarball if you haven't done so already. do the install. then disconnect and never go online again. pip2 will also install some dependencies from the net when you do the install so trying to do it all offline is just going to be a pita. You only need to stay offline once the wallet has been created. Until then you can go online. |
|
|
|
i am new to linux and although i have done it once before a long time ago, it seems that i am currently stuck installing it again. i have downloaded the tar.gz file and verified the signature by googling half an hour about how to do it  but now i am stuck on how to open the tar.gz file using terminal (using Ubuntu) and then installing electrum from. i have gone as far as switching to the directory it is saved in but forgot what the commands were to open the file. and i assume when i open it i should do the following: right? The instructions for ubuntu are right there on the download page. Why don't you just follow them? You don't need to untar the tarball. Just install the dependencies and use pip2 to do the install for you: sudo apt-get install python-qt4 python-pip
sudo pip2 Electrum-tarball.tar.gz
|
|
|
|
Staying as it is means getting obsolete, loosing competition. It's better to fork to 2 different coins and see which one outcompetes the other. But before that it would be better to try to forget mutual insults, become less arrogant, more respectful to our opponents and find common ground after all.
I guess the problem could be that most communication in our cryptoworld is going online. For some reason, online communication is almost always much less civilized than offline. I think VIPs should arrange real world meetings much more often.
A fork wouldn't mean a competition. A fork would result in Mutually Assured Destruction. |
|
|
|
I doubt there will be wallet software that will support spending directly on-chain like we have now.
not you too oh yeah i'm with core |
|
|
|
Suppose someone wants to do long term cold storage. I am talking about 5-10 years.
Suppose in 10 years Electrum no longer exists because all the nodes are down or the current version 2.8.x just becomes obsolete.
Is there anyway to save a copy of the wallet with the seed and be able to see the private key, and then later sweep that address to another address?
It is not feasible to do cold storage for such a long time using any software. Bitcoin could change completely in 5-10 years. Manually storing addresses using paper wallets would probably be a more ideal method for such a long term cold wallet. You could also easily export the private keys if you are using Electrum for a cold wallet. It just gets more time consuming if you use a large number of addresses unless you use a tool like previously mentioned to regenerate the addresses. Yes in theory it's possible to do a lot of things. As long as you have the private key then anything is possible. An electrum wallet is a private key in another format i.e. a seed that leads to a whole tree of key pairs. So if you are willing to do the work when the time comes to spend your coins then anything is possible. There will be work involved because in 10 years a lot could have changed. Probably in 10 years time we will all have migrated to using lightning. I doubt there will be wallet software that will support spending directly on-chain like we have now. |
|
|
|
|
Use file> open to open the correct wallet file. The window title will list which wallet file you have open at any time.
Second stop setting passwords if you can't make that feature work for you. You don't have to set a password!
|
|
|
|
Suppose someone wants to do long term cold storage. I am talking about 5-10 years.
Suppose in 10 years Electrum no longer exists because all the nodes are down or the current version 2.8.x just becomes obsolete.
Is there anyway to save a copy of the wallet with the seed and be able to see the private key, and then later sweep that address to another address?
It is not feasible to do cold storage for such a long time using any software. Bitcoin could change completely in 5-10 years. |
|
|
|
Alright, I really like electrum so far, coming from creating manual wallets via coinb.in, and I really appreciate your help. What would you say is a healthy number of addresses that electrum can handle? I don't mind creating a new wallet every month or so, will it handle my load if I get few hundred transactions per month and create a new wallet every month or so?
I honestly don't know how large a wallet electrum can handle. I only know what I've picked up reading and answering questions here. It would be in the thousands of addresses though. BTW in that other thread you talk about uploading addresses as a text file. You do realize that you can generate addresses with just the master public key of the wallet, don't you? You cannot spend money with just the master public key so it is safe to install that on a server. You can then generate address on the fly on the server. I've tried explaining this to you above too: BTW you can generate addresses for ecommerce applications using scripts. All the script will need is the master public key.
As an example you can see this plugin I made for wordpress that does that: https://wordpress.org/plugins/bitcoin-address/There are scripts available for a lot of programming languages so if you tell us which language you prefer I can perhaps point one out for you. |
|
|
|
|
you can create a new wallet using the file menu > new/restore option.
|
|
|
|
Well, I used 2 of the 250 addresses, so I guess that had to do something with gap limit.
Yes, it says "gap_limit": 252,
This shouldn't have happened. If you configured it to 250 then that's where it should have remained. If you can reproduce it then it looks like you found a bug. |
|
|
|
Just read your posts, can we clarify this. If i set my gap limit to 250, and received some coins to the 166th address then electrum will look up to my gap limit (250) and create additional addresses until I have (166+250=416) total addresses?
Yep on the "receiving" chain. The change address chain also has a gap limit but it is a fixed number. New change addresses are generated to maintain unused addresses just like with the main chain but the gap limit there is not user configurable. And it's not possible for me to lose some addresses/bitcoins, as long as I remember my seed words and have the ability to increase the gap limit, because the default one is 20, right?
Yes this is correct. But you should know that electrum is not optimized to support thousands of addresses. It tends to get slow if there are a lot of addresses in a wallet. So periodically you will have to migrate your funds to fresh electrum wallet that you create using the file> new/restore option. BTW you can generate addresses for ecommerce applications using scripts. All the script will need is the master public key. |
|
|
|
i don't know why the gap limit increased to 252 rather than 250. does it say the following when you view the file in notepad: Or are you counting the addresses manually and determining the gap limit that way? To answer your second question the gap limit is the number of unused addresses, beyond the index of the last used address in your wallet, that electrum keeps track off. So 250 gap limit doesn't mean you have just 250 addresses in your wallet. I've explained it here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1845025.msg18535357#msg18535357 |
|
|
|
Adding for clarification. Of course there is no danger if the MPK is known because you can't spend any coins with only the MPK to a wallet. I still protect mine because you can produce ALL the addresses for the entire wallet as well as all transaction activity just by having the MPK. The private key issue is one of concern and accounts for much of the reason I use a hardware wallet along with Electrum. I just don't like any private keys online anywhere, anytime, anyhow for my stuff. Two computer cold approach is OK but its not convenient, which is why I went hardware wallet.
A multisig wallet is another option. Both electrum and bitpay/copay make that easy now. |
|
|
|
If I sign a message and so lose the SHA256, and RIPEMD160 protections for that address, now only having ECDSA,
are all the other addresses so weakened as it is a deterministic wallet or otherwise?
no they are not. the only scenario where this is a problem is below: - attacker has your master public key aka extended public key. - attacker has the private key for any one of your addresses (private key not public key). In the above scenario the attacker can enumerate all the private keys in your electrum wallet. They can get all the money. For other deterministic wallets it is different because they use hardening at some levels. Hardened chains can't be derived if the attacker has the above information. There are downsides to this as well such as the fact that you can generate addresses from just the xpub which is a useful feature of deterministic wallets. |
|
|
|
but if you have a wallet you restore from seed how does it know how many change addresses you had before? If you don't bump the gap you may not see all your coins. What am I missing?
The same way it knows how many receiving addresses you had before. Each address has an index. The gap limit is the lookahead window. It keeps looking for addresses with transactions starting from the 0 index address and only stops when it finds x consecutive unused addresses where x is the gap limit. |
|
|
|
this is a concerning issue. Old seeds should be fully compatible with never versions.
I am able to use old seeds in new wallets. Are you saying this is an issue with 2.7?
There's also a standalone python script i wrote somewhere in this subforum that
you can use to generate address/keys from electrum seed for the old 12 word seed version...
I was paranoid this kind of thing might happen
...although I'm still skeptical it actually is
happening for you.
Are you using a 12 or 13 word seed?
Old seeds are compatible with the latest electrum. Electrum strives to maintain backward compatibility with old seeds. The OP hasn't replied so he was either mistaken or trolling. |
|
|
|
Hello guys, Thanks for the assistance. I had totally gave up hope on recovering my funds;so I decided to move on with my new version wallet. Anyway, after depositing a few bitcoins my bitcoin balance updated itself I noticed it had factored in my previous bitcoin balance. So my bitcoins are still in there but they were not reflecting on the new wallet until I made a new deposit. I always bump the gap limit when restoring from seed on an old wallet. That seems to fix these kinds of issues. This is bad advice. You should not be changing the gap limit unless you have to. The default gap limit is fine for most users. If you change the gap limit you will have to make sure to remember to do that the next time you restore your wallet. A lot of users will forget to do that and come here and complain that their wallet is not showing the correct balance. So please don't tell users to change the gap limit unless they have to (for example for merchant wallet applications). |
|
|
|
are you sure its not a gap limit issue?
well it could be but the guy is clearly a newb so i don't think he would have increased the gap limit. If he used his wallet a lot in the past and it created many change addreses, and you're trying to recreate it from seed, you wont see all of them. It's only a problem if you change the gap limit from the default. Otherwise electrum will discover all your change addresses too. Also electrum is backward compatible with old seeds. We see threads like these all the time but unfortunately we never learn the outcome because the OPs always stops replying. I suspect it is because they figure out what mistake they made and correct it. But they don't bother telling us. Here again the OP has stopped replying. Hopefully he will chime in so we can understand what happened. |
|
|
|
are you sure its not a gap limit issue?
well it could be but the guy is clearly a newb so i don't think he would have increased the gap limit. |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
