We are not talking about an encryption passphrase here. We are talking about the entropy of Bitcoin addresses used by the client.
For this, 128 bits is not overkill. Bitcoin BIP 32 recommends to use at least 128 bits for this: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0032
As an additional safety measure, Electrum adds a little bit of key stretching to generate the master key (100000 iterations of sha256, which is equivalent to adding a few extra bits of entropy to the seed)

if your transaction is unconfirmed, and only exists at one server, that means that it was not propagated through the network.
there might be various reasons for that (the most common cause is insufficient fee)

To fix this situation, use another server.
The first transaction you will do will, when it gets confirmed, invalidate the unconfirmed transaction that is still in electrum.datemas.de's memory, and it will disappear from there.

The core of Electrum is very stable. The bug reported by the OP is a minor GUI issue, that only affects address completions.

Small GUI bugs like this are to be expected in any major release, because there are so many different ways to use a GUI, developers cannot test all of them.
In contrast, there is only a small set of functions in the core of the software. A bug there would be noticed immediately.

try this:

Since we now have a subforum for Electrum, I am rewriting here what I already said in other threads. I hope it's more visible in its own thread.

It is not safe to use a portable version of Electrum on an insecure computer!

Don't get me wrong: I am not saying that a portable build is by itself more dangerous than a non-portable version.
However, a portable version does not bring anything more in terms of security. It does not protect you from the computer you are using.
In addition, portable builds encourage dangerous behaviour, because they make it very easy to use your wallet on third party computers, that might be infected with viruses and keyloggers.

I was never enthusiastic about distributing portable versions of Electrum.
I did it because the demand for portable versions was so high that portable builds distributed by third parties were getting popular.
That's the only reason why I accepted to distribute portable builds: I do this in order to avoid an even worse situation.

thanks for the report. I fixed that bug in git.
I will make a 1.7.1 release this week-end, that fixes the bugs reported during this week.

no, these features are still there. select 'advanced' in your display->receive tab settings

apologies, we had to make a last minute fix to the 1.7 package on the website; there was a bug with imported keys.
please upgrade if you encounter it.

version 1.7 is out! announcement will follow!

Electrum does not let you use an arbitrary sequence of words as seed. This is because humans are not good at generating really random phrases.

The seed generated by Electrum is a 128-bit random number. It is encoded as a sequence of 12 words, for the purpose of memorization. However, it is important to understand that it has 128-bits of entropy. A phrase generated by a human, or picked from a random book opened at a random page, will in general be much less random, and much more vulnerable to attacks. (and "much more" here means astronomically more).

In this type of attack, time is on the side of the attacker. It is perfectly possible for an attacker to try all the phrases existing in a large database of books, and some variants of those, until they find a wallet. In contrast, it is not possible to do the same with 2^128 random phrases.

As you may have noticed, it is possible to bypass this protection; if you restore your wallet from a hexadecimal string, any string length will be accepted. However, this will only work with hexadecimal inputs. Thus, if you absolutely insist on using an arbitrary phrase as seed, you will need to hex-encode it yourself. Consider this as a protection.

the wallet file should be human readable.
if this is not the case, I guess something bad happened to your file.

it looks like the file you are opening is in binary format...
perhaps you overwrote the wallet file with somethging else?

this has been asked many times; I am tired of answering the same question over again.
since we now have a subforum, I will post it in its own thread

open it with emacs; it will open anything

if you have lost your seed, open the corrupted electrum.dat with an editor and see if there is a 'seed' variable in it.
if it is still there, your coins can be found.

if the seed is not encrypted, restore your wallet with it
if it is encrypted, you will need to decrypt it manually, but that's not difficult.

This error does not mean that the wallet file is gone, but that the wallet file is corrupted.

by default, the wallet file is located in your .electrum directory:
/home/your_user_name/.electrum/

To access your coins, the easiest way is to restore your wallet from seed, using a different file ;
To do this, move the corrupted file to another location, or start electrum with "-w filename" argument, and restore it.

I would like to know why that file is corrupted; if you can figure out, please let me know.

may I ask what makes you believe you lost some bitcoins?

if you used a gambling site with zero confirmations, and the transaction you sent to place your bet is not confirmed, then
the possible gains you received from the gambling site will be cancelled too, because that transaction depends on the first one.

hence my question: are those disappeared bitcoins a gambling gain?

thanks for the typo.

so, as I mentioned in PM, I did not find anything wrong with your wallet.
can you give me the the id of the transactions that you believe resulted in a loss of coins?

I suspect this is the same problem as in another thread.
if that is the case, it will be fixed with version 1.7 (to be released soon)

if you want to get a diagnostic, PM me your master public key and I'll have a look

No, your problem is completely different from the OP. afaict, the OP's money is not lost.

You imported a private key, sent money from that imported address, and you expected the change to be sent back to your imported address.
However, the change was sent to a change address, which is generated from your seed.
You did not save your seed, and you deleted your wallet, keeping only the private key of your imported address. This is how you lost money.

Concerning your suggestion:
The change coming from an imported key could indeed be sent back to that key, but I am not sure if you really understand all the implications such a behaviour would have:
1. where should change be sent when one transaction input is imported and the other is not? what are the user expectations going to be in that case?
2. in general, it is safer to send change to an Electrum address, because those addresses are recoverable from seed; imported keys are not.


Electrum told you to save your seed, and it also told you to be careful when you imported private keys. You ignored those two warnings.
Do you think that adding a third warning will prevent that? I am not so sure about that...
I am willing to modify the message of the second warning, adding the info you suggest.
However, I do not think it would be a good idea to create a third warning; more warnings result in people paying less attention to them

You can use the same seed on every machine you use.
This is how people actually use it: create your seed on one machine, and restore your wallet from that seed on other machines.

yes, one of the devs (Azelphur) started to write a kivy GUI, but he had no time to finish it.
if you'd like to help, please get in touch!