use gpg tools as per this guide: https://bitzuma.com/posts/how-to-verify-an-electrum-download-on-mac/

Familiarize yourself with the file menu in electrum. File > save copy lets you save a copy of the wallet for backup purposes. File > new/restore lets you create a new wallet. You will need to do that if you want a deterministic wallet with a seed. File > open and recently open let you switch wallet files. So now you how to create a new wallet all you have to do is send from your old wallet to your new wallet.

OP I suggest switching to a pool that gives you more control over when payouts are made to your address. Instead of frequently getting paid small amounts you should do withdrawals of larger amounts every so often. This will reduce the number of unspent outputs in your wallet.

A private key isn't 32 bits. That would be way too small. It's 256 bits.

electrum will keep deriving new private keys from your seed and it'll keep moving coins to addresses corresponding to those private keys. in order to spend those coins you will need those newly generated private keys. that is why a private key export is a dangerous thing because it gives you a false sense of security. you think you have a good and complete backup but you don't. what you should be backing up is the seed. all private keys past, present and future are derived from that so if you have it's sufficient.

The seed is on your HW. That's the point of using an HW - it retains exclusive knowledge of the seed and derived private keys and does transaction signing on your behalf. If electrum had access to the seed there would be no point in using an HW.

AFAIK HW wallets are encrypted using the master public key provided by the HW. So as long as you have the HW you can view the wallet. Spending requires confirming the transaction on the HW which may involve entering a PIN.

RDP programs like team viewer have been the source of many thefts in the past.  So don't do this. Don't give anyone access to your system.

I suggest you join #electrum irc channel on freenode and ask for help from the developers there.

there's two types of encryption in electrum wallet files:

1. full wallet file encryption where you are asked for the password when opening the wallet file and again if and when you attempt to send coins or view wallet secrets like the private keys/seed

2. secret only encryption where you are only asked for the password when sending coins or trying to view wallet private keys or seed. you can view transactions, history, balance etc. without providing the password.

if you are not being asked for a password at startup then you likely have the second type of encryption. you can tell by  attempting to view the seed via wallet > seed. you can modify how your wallet is encrypted via wallet > password. checking encrypt wallet file there should convert it to full wallet file encryption.

It is recommended that you verify that you know the password (for example by attempting to view the seed via wallet > seed) before you receive more money to this wallet. Otherwise you might find that you can't spend it! Note that encryption type 1 was created for exactly this reason - you can't view receive addresses without verifying that you know the password.

if you enable pruning you'll have to download teh chain again each time you switch wallets. either don't enable pruning, use the multiwallet option or use dumpwallet to dump the private keys and then import them into a lite app like electrum. the latter is the answer to  the question about what to do if you don't know the addresses and want to export the private keys - dumpwallet dumps everything to file.

the way the wallet recovery tool here works is that it considers the first three words a checksum and they have to be from the v2 list and the rest can be from v3 where interruptions etc. are. if the first 3 are not in v2 it'll display that unknown word error.  so even according to their own rules the mnemonic is incorrect.

if you're certain the phrase you have is correct and you think there's enough money in that wallet to justify it you may consider hiring a javascript developer to help you decode this.

note you still need the uuid of the wallet. have you had any luck finding that in your email archives?

overall this is a mess and blockchain.info has really let down old users of its wallet.

edit: also not really an electrum issue. you may have better luck if you ask a mod to move it to the technical support forum.

those are likely electrum servers. it's a false positive. you didn't have to delete everything. install it all again and whitelist electrum

the list of words is in the blockchain.info list posted by brewmaster above. speculating on other wallets is pointless. the recovery link bob123 posted is for the newer version. the legacy wallet recovery is here:

https://blockchain.info/wallet/forgot-password

these words are not a wallet seed. these old wallets were not HD wallets. the words are a password recovery phrase i.e. the wallet password encoded as a series of words. in addition to the password you will also need the user id which you can only get by searching your email archives for emails from blockchain.info. the uid consists of letters, digits and hyphens and is not a user friendly username. once you have both you can login to your wallet.

spotily is not the same person as the OP who lost money. spotily bumped up this old thread because malware bytes stopped electrum from accessing an electrum server. i think that is his/her only concern.

in that case you can whitelist it in malware bytes. it's probably just an electrum server. if it creates trouble for you can always switch to another.

all those claiming to have gotten electrum from the official website should go to their browser history and confirm the exact url they downloaded from. there are many fake sites that look official and legit.

Looks like they consolidated various inputs into one larger output. Perhaps they did it during a low fee period.


Most people don't have a reason to do this. Your wallet will automatically draw from these inputs when it needs to so going out of your way to do it is normally not required or cost effective.

If you really want to do it right click on the address in question on the addresses tab and choose spend from. Then click on max on the send tab to spend the entire amount i.e. all unspent outputs sent to that address.

keeping a list of all generated addresses is one thing although it could be simplified to one number i.e. the index of the last address you generated. monitoring utxos is the job of the wallet. if you started doing that in your app you'd be duplicating the work of a wallet. instead it would be better to  derive all the private keys upto that index you have stored in your db and import them all into bitcoin core. let core figure out which addresses have utxos.

how did you install electrum?

what is the output of "which electrum" in a terminal?

yep gap limit does factor into it. you can modify it but the performance of the wallet software may suffer. you haven't told us what wallet you intend to use? if it's electrum then you may need to run your own electrum personal server and bitcoin core at the backend so that it can handle all the queries your wallet generates. you won't be able to rely on public servers.

another option is bitcoin core alone but you'll have to manually import the private keys for each address. bitcoin core's native derivation scheme uses hardened addresses which means you can't derive them using the xpub. so that's why you'll have to manually derive and import private keys corresponding to the derivation scheme you are using on your site.


yes and that's what a wallet does automatically.

yes. an easier way is to simply add a seed extension by clicking on options in the seed entry step and choosing to extend the seed. different extension = different wallet. the extension can be any characters.