See the part about transaction flooding:

https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.11.0

On reddit someone set minrelaytxfee to 0.0001 (double what is suggested above) and his node is using very little RAM.

If your computer has malware when you create your electrum wallet then its possible the malware will just steal your seed. But if it doesn't have malware at the time of wallet creation then you are definitely protected with a 2FA wallet from future malware infections. The 25 word seed is not written to the wallet file so any future malware infection will not be able to spend your bitcoin all by itself. Any transaction will have to be signed by trusted coin and they require you enter the 2FA code first and of course in the process you review the transaction. I suppose if the malware was really sophisticated it could show you a fake transaction on-screen to get you to enter the 2fa code but then nothing can protect you from that sort of malware.

Depends on how paranoid you are. If you don't trust the laptop repairmen then you should know that he could just install some malware on your hard drive while he has it with him. That way he can steal your bitcoin remotely later.

There has been no formal audit that I know of if that's what you mean. It's open source so lots of interested people look over the code from time to time. Some of them find security holes that they report. Also see open issues

You know you are worried about electrum's security when its open source but you forget about your closed source operating system. Only Microsoft knows what's going with Windows code.

Anyway this is all just speculation. You are paranoid and I'm feeding your paranoia

It already is. That's how entropy is collected by the linux kernel. That's why I'm saying Linux does not rely on CPU RNG alone.


It's just that if Intel compromised the RNG they must have compromised other parts of the CPU as well right? Why stop at just RNG? Everything goes through the CPU so your entire system could be compromised.

You should remove your hard drive before sending off your laptop for repair. Otherwise the repairman might steal your bitcoin!

Bitcoin addresses only have 128 bits of security. A larger seed is pointless.

Depends on the source of the external entropy. I don't really know why you are worried about this. If your CPU is insecure then everything is insecure.

If it's any consolation on Linux systems at least the output of the hardware RNG in the CPU is XORed with whatever entropy the system collects from its normal operation i.e. disk seeks, network activity, user mouse and keyboard activity etc.

https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/SDcoemc9V3J

I am not sure. I suggest reading the source code.

https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/

The entropy you provide has to be in base 10

I do know that if you give it a really large number for entropy it'll up the seed size.

It uses the operating system RNG:


https://bitcoinspakistan.com/blog/electrum-seed-explained/

You can make your own seed:

https://bitcoinspakistan.com/blog/make-your-own-electrum-seed/

BTW if your OS has been compromised then no wallet can protect you.

Just use the file menu > save copy command to save a copy of the wallet on a removable drive. Then on the freshly installed system use file>open to open the wallet. That's all.

Electrum is a deterministic wallet which means that all address specific private keys are derived from a single seed. This is shown in the user interface in the human friendly form of 13 random words. The words and their order is important. Write down the seed and it is the only backup you need. *All* the address specific private keys can be derived from it. The addresses themselves are derived from the private keys so all your addresses can be recovered with just the 13 word seed.

If you like you can also make a backup of the wallet file using file menu > save copy. The wallet file stores address and transaction labels that cannot be recovered from the seed alone.


Electrum will automatically create new addresses from your seed when you start to use the old ones. It tries to make sure you always have at least 10 UNUSED addresses. As mentioned above all addresses and address specific private keys can be recovered from the seed or a one time wallet file backup. Although if you add a lot of labels you will want to make more frequent backups of the wallet file just for the labels.

Oh and desktop wallets are definitely better than web wallets.

Addresses never expire. This thread is based on a misconception. People replying to the OP need to stop talking about addresses or wallets expiring.

TLDs aren't made for micro-niches. The market has to be large enough for it to be worth the cost of running the registry including the fees that you have to pay ICANN. So we want a TLD for all crypto currencies not just bitcoin. While bitcoin is the most successful today there remains the possibility that some other alt coin will come that will supersede bitcoin in the future. Besides .coin can be used for digital currencies outside the crypto space too.

Personally I like the idea of a bit.coin, btc.coin, news.coin or something.coin. The possibilities for nice domain names are greater IMO.

I didn't say extended master password. I said your extended private key and the extended public keys of the other participants in this multisig wallet. You can see examples of extended keys here. xprv... = extended private key and xpub... = extended public key.

.coin would be best IMO

Use file > new/restore to create a new wallet. Choose to restore and choose multisig as the wallet type. Then just paste in the extended private key of your wallet and the extended public keys of the other participants.

It isn't possible to find a key with coins in it. Please read the answers that others have given. The numbers are too large.

The key logger would need to be on both computers not just one. That is why we use 2FA/multisig because any attacker has to compromise two systems to steal anything.