so the wallet cannot be viewed until a password is provided. this is an interesting change indeed. it'll certainly protect people from sending money to wallets they can't spend from.

edit: I also see you've added support for bitcoin unlimited's testnet nolnet. I guess you are hedging your bets

The derivation path is the same for multisig addresses. If you want to check for yourself then restore a wallet with the following xprivs:

a: xprv9s21ZrQH143K2j4ApvAWXbXnRQxxY1175NJFyzRSL3copkzRrmR9iFju2bPKMThZZ5X8dBHY8Hn So3Tp1mosezGpbhMxjFewR7fWsWqVuzd

b: xprv9s21ZrQH143K2dEFaB8GQ9FmTdLyMijhPngdimqyUiwXgh5rmh92n4x6JEWutHeDi2qAAHPv92S 3SuhNuktYZt22p2jgWMoK5WkDXBnkj4S

The above two are generated using bip32.org (passphrase a and b resp.)

The first address pubkeys of the above two are (m/0/0):


a0: 0223bb76b4e6844a6bde363057fab2aa5df5bc3a7e89c7e8124f6265f8080065fa
b0: 0246277670f2d0ff5e86af5e82f8f98d3e1cd90d0b0f252df6518fd842568a5551

And the resulting address is 3Nw1BqfMgdLDAsu67g74dJLxSPAxQEmfZz. This is what you will see in electrum as well as on coinbin:

https://coinb.in/#newMultiSig

just download the binary tarball from bitcoin.org, untar it and run bitcoind. that's all.

Please read this post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1816926.msg18101203#msg18101203

It answers your implied questions too.

Maybe now electrum will hide the wallets contents until you enter a password. I can see a few instances where this might be a good idea:

- There were some users who complained that anyone with access to the wallet file could see the balance and transactions. The advice for such users has always been to use the multiuser functionality of their OS if they don't want other people seeing their files. Now they have another option.

- Then there were those users who received money to their wallets but when they went to spend it they found that they didn't know the password and neither did they have the seed. A few of them have complained here that they shouldn't be allowed to receive money into a wallet when they can't spend it. If the whole wallet is encrypted then they can't see their receiving addresses and so can't lose their money!

you misunderstood apt doesn't verify the electrum download. You did that using pip.

You installed dependencies via apt and those are verified:


But the pip install step did not involve apt. You have to verify the electrum tar ball manually

There could be a few reasons for this:

- the order of the pub key matters. a different order will yield a different address. electrum puts the pub keys in lexicographic order first: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/40382 so make sure you do the same

- the address derivation path matters. This is what electrum uses: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/36956

So make sure the above is all consistent with what electrum does.

Alternatively you could create a watch only installation of electrum on your server and have electrum derive addresses. Electrum has a daemon mode that you can use. You use the addrequest command to get addresses but note that it won't create more addresses than the gap limit so you'll have to increase the gap limit + keep track of which addresses have been used in case you exceed the gap limit.

no you don't have to uninstall anything. the instructions there are correct. what you install using apt-get is already verified by apt prior to installation. you only need to verify the electrum tar ball that you downloaded.

Note that you are supposed to verify it before installing it:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=518133.msg5981126#msg5981126

You don't have to be root to verify the download. You only need to be root if you want to install it. Also adjust the ELECTRUM_VERSION variable to the one you downloaded.

bip39 supports passphrases so you can have more than one secret behind your HD wallet.


I admit that I'm not sure what you are up to because you've done a piss poor job of explaining it. Maybe you control the bitcoin clients your users use in which case you can do what you like.


Once again that's what payment requests do.

Anyway I'm out.

But you are not writing encrypted data most of the time. The only thing encrypted with the password is the seed and any imported private keys. The  seed is generated once at wallet creation, encrypted and stored. Same goes for private keys at the time of import. You only need the password for signing transactions and you will still need that even if you use public key crypto.

good catch. i used a bookmark so i didn't notice that. you should remove the fake url from your quote. we don't want it to show up in google results now do we?

the release notes are correct though:

https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/RELEASE-NOTES

So I'm still left wondering what benefit using public key crypto to encrypt the wallet seed has over the old aes way?

the latest version has support for child pays for parent. so upgrade and see if you can figure it out:

http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/faq.html#my-transaction-has-been-unconfirmed-for-a-long-time-what-can-i-do

he doesn't have to do anything else after sweeping because by sweeping the private keys he is moving the funds to an address only he controls. that is what sweeping means.

What is the advantage of this over the earlier symmetric encryption?

No there isn't. The only way to tell they are related is because they show up in transactions together when you go to spend your coins. This applies to all wallet types including the old fashioned non-deterministic ones.

Of course if you are worried about people finding out that the addresses are related by looking at the blockchain you can simply use coin control features as found in electrum or bitcoin core to pick your inputs manually and avoid revealing any links between your addresses.

Also in case you didn't know even Bitcoin Core is now deterministic.

BTW regarding generating lots of private keys offline please do read this:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=912337.0

Pay special attention to posts by gmaxwell and dabura667 (especially post #8)


I just made all that up. No client supports picking up xpubs from DNS, validating DNSSEC and then generating an address to send payments to. Stealth addresses are the closest thing to that but they are not widely supported.

Payment requests OTOH are very well supported. Just use that and spare us

If users' bitcoin clients are going to check dns then why publish the address on the web page at all? Let the bitcoin wallets grab the xpub from dns and send to some address derived from that.

First of all you should have created your own thread instead of bumping this one year old one. The OP was trying to sweep keys to an offline wallet and that was his problem.

So obviously make sure electrum is connected to the net. There should be a green orb icon in the bottom right corner of the electrum window.

To add to what Hi-Tec99 said your private keys should be in wallet import format. They look like this:

>For private keys associated with uncompressed public keys, they are 51 characters and always start with the number 5. Private keys associated with compressed public keys are 52 characters and start with a capital L or K.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Private_key#Base58_Wallet_Import_format

So 51-52 characters starting with 5, L, or K.

write down your seed. use file > new/restore to restore your wallet from seed. see if that does it.

if it doesn't then rename your electrum data directory which is one level up from teh wallet directory:

http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/faq.html#where-is-my-wallet-file-located

then run electrum and restore your wallet from seed. see if that fixes it.

bring the coins tab into view by going to wallet menu > coins. right clicking on an address there will allow you to spend from it. you can also select individual inputs.