To mask their IP address of course... they were most likely NOT running a remote desktop, but a proxy server to redirect their traffic and mask their real IP address. I would not be surprised if they actually used several proxy servers to bounce their connection around to try and prevent anyone from tracking them.

Then hosseinimr93 is correct, the only way to recover coins from an Electrum 2FA wallet is:

- With wallet file and 2FA code
or
- Restore from 12 word seed mnemonic and use "disable 2FA" option.


TrustedCoin have reset 2FA accounts for users in the past, so all hope is not lost... but you'll need to contact them and provide as much detail as possible to prove you are the actual owner... having access to the original email account that was used to register the wallet with TrustedCoin is a good start!

Good luck.

There was a shady wallet from a (now defunct) website called "bitsblock.io" that looked like Bitcoin Core and would email you a "12 word recovery seed" when you set up an account... it was a total scam, and it's good to see that the website is no longer active.

Can you please take a screenshot for what you are being asked for when you try to create a new wallet? It would help immensely to clear up the confusion as to which wallet you are actually using, and what it is actually asking you for.

Did you remember to tick the box that says "omit spaces in key data"... by default this is left ticked and you end up with a private key that looks something like this:

Electrum won't work if you have those extra spaces... it needs to be:


Also, make sure you're not copying the "PrivBase58:" part... you ONLY want the long string of characters starting with a 5... like this:

It won't matter if it was synced on the old one or not... when you have the new computer and new client setup and fully synced, you'll be able to see everything as required.


Yes, that should be fine... you will just need to make sure that you don't forget that passphrase, as it will be required to send coins from that wallet.dat now.




If you have a look here: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,2w

You can see the last 2 weeks worth of activity... you'll note that generally, the mempool is relatively "empty" and the fees are generally lower on "weekends"...  Having said that, if you look at the "30d" chart, you'll notice things were just crazy during the end of Oct... and even on weekends the mempool was quite full and the fees were quite high. So, it's not guaranteed, and a big bull run or price dump can mean lots of extra activity, even on weekends... but weekends tend to be quieter and the fees lower.

Just check the website, when you're considering sending, and you'll get a quick snapshot of how "busy" things are etc.

Can you please just clarify a couple of things... as I'm unsure exactly how you generated the seed mnemonic you're attempting to recover using btcrecover...

So, you used a custom wordlist to generate the passphrase? Or did you take the 12 word seed mnemonic generated by Electrum v1.x and then scrambled the order?


The old words will be detected as a "Old" seed by Electrum... I just created a 12 word seed mnemonic in an old version of Electrum (1.8.1 portable)... When I attempt to import that seed mnemonic into Electrum 4.0.5 it is still accepted:

Yes, once Bitcoin Core is fully synced, you can shut it down... then copy the old wallet.dat into the Bitcoin Coin "data directory". You can find the data directory by looking in the "Window -> Information" menu... look for the "Datadir" value:


Once you've copied the wallet.dat into that directory, you can simply restart Bitcoin Core and it will automatically use this wallet.dat.

NOTE: if the file is not called exactly "wallet.dat", once you have restarted Bitcoin Core, you'll need to use the "File -> Open wallet" menu and select the .dat file that you copied into the datadir.


How exactly did you encrypt it? Did you add a passphrase to it using the "Settings -> Encrypt wallet" menu option within Bitcoin Core? or did you use some external form of encryption?


Network fees are always dependent on a number of things, data size of the transaction, current network conditions etc... if the wallet contains lots and lots of tiny amounts, it'll make any transaction you create larger than normal and the total fee required will be more than normal. If the network is busy, you don't necessarily need to send with a large fee, but you'll end up waiting for a number of hours to get the transaction confirmed.

In any case, Bitcoin Core allows you to customise the fee rates to your liking... you can easily send using the minimum amount of 0.00001000 BTC/kB if you want (that is the equivalent of 1 sat/byte). You just need to be aware that this could mean it takes a while for the transaction to get included in a block if the network is busy and fee rates are "high".

Which is fine... as long as the person you're dealing with is actually using a wallet that allows them to sign messages.

There are a lot of wallets that simply don't provide this functionality. Additionally, if you're trying to promote the use of SegWit, this becomes more difficult given the lack of standards around signing nested SegWit (which a lot of wallets use instead of bech32 for #compatibilityReasons).

Also, a lot of newbies default to using things like exchanges and/or other web-based services as their "wallet"

What do you do if someone can't sign an address? do you just refuse to deal with them?

Outdated is an understatement... it has not been updated in over 2 years!!?!




I was wondering why "bitkey" sounded familiar, but I couldn't remember seeing or hearing anything about it recently... it's effectively a "dead" project. Which is a bit sad, as the concept was pretty good.

Not quite. It's in the name "blockchain"... so, it's a chain of "blocks"... each block contains a number of transactions. A block includes the hash of the previous block in it's header, that's what links them together.


It's not TXIDs that allow you to spend the coins... you reference a particular "vout" from a previous TXID, also known as an "Unspent Transaction Output" or UTXO.

One of the fundamentals of bitcoin is that when you spend a UTXO (ie. it is used as an input in a transaction), the entire UTXO is consumed... any "leftovers" (aka "change") is then generated as a completely new UTXO.

So... if you had the following situation where you had previously received 0.1 BTC... it would have been created as a UTXO from some transaction, we'll call this UTXO, "OutputA". If you subsequently used this UTXO to send 0.08 BTC to someone, you would end up with a transaction that generated 2 UTXOs:

OutputA 0.1 BTC --|--> OutputB 0.08 BTC (amount sent)
                           |--> OutputC 0.02 BTC ("change")

(ignoring transaction fees)


Now, if you wanted to spend your "leftover" 0.02 BTC, you can't use OutputA, as that has already been consumed (aka "spent")... instead you need to use the "new" UTXO (OutputC).

A very impressive collection...

I had no idea they had all the holiday/special event cards! That's pretty cool, and would be a neat way to get people into Bitcoin. I could also see them as being an alternative to a "gift card"... when you want something just a little  bit different.

I guess it depends if you think that underpaying (and potentially getting a transaction stuck) is "worse" than overpaying (and potentially spending a few hundred/thousand satoshi's more than you needed to).

Rather than choosing to always under or overpay... I tend to go with whatever is my priority at the time. Sometimes, I'm just consolidating funds and don't anticipate needing to spend anything in the immediate future, so I can afford to wait hours (or days) and a 1 sat/vbyte fee is just fine. Other times, I need the money moved ASAP, so if I end up having to use 20 sats/vbyte instead of 10 sats/vbyte to "guarantee" it in the next 30mins-1hr (and then wait 2 hours for a block! then so be it...

Unless you've got large transaction weight, the difference in the fee rate isn't going to make much of a difference to the total fee anyway... 168 sats vs 3000 sats? that's ~3c vs ~50c... chump change really.

Once you get into transactions that are like 1000bytes+ and/or you start using fee rates 100+ sats/vbyte, then things start to get a bit more "expensive"...


Still, it's nice to see that people are thinking about this stuff and taking a slightly different approach.

If your friend has a clipboard virus, it could have easily changed the address if they copy/pasted it to you. If they're using a "scam" wallet, it could have given them a fake address which they gave to you.


As long as the address you were given to send funds to was "3DTjFxbN1k8sFi5ro65sdYKSh1QauThzYw", and the amount to send was supposed to be "0.015 BTC" then you did everything correctly and the problem is at the receiver's end, not yours.

Having said that... Blockcypher noted something slightly unusual about your transaction:



Did you try to "cancel" this transaction in Electrum or something?

And to round out the list... Coinkite are giving 15% off most of their products:


Store link: https://store.coinkite.com/store


NOTE: the 15% discount also seems to aplpyt to the shipping cost! I added a coldcard and selected a shipping option, and it was giving the 15% off based on the total of coldcard+shipping! That's actually pretty neat!

And now Trezor have sent me a notification of their Black Friday Promo for 2020...

20% off... promocode is: BLACKFRIDAY2020 - NOTE: this is CASE sensitive!

Electrum allows you to create multiple wallet files... so, as Abdussamad said, you can just go ahead and create a "new" one and select "Multisig" at the appropriate time.

You will just need to make sure that "Person2" uses the correct wallet when using Electrum and doesn't accidently try and receive funds to their "standard" wallet, which are meant for the "multisig" wallet... as they will have different addresses etc.

Correct. Once Bitcoin Core finishes syncing, it will show all the transaction history and correct balance. The issue being that syncing Bitcoin Core can take a "long time"™ as it needs to download and verify the entire blockchain which is currently 350+gigs worth of data.

This is also the "safest" option, as there is no need to expose private keys which you can potentially do when using export/import etc.

Sort of... if you're exporting/importing individual keys, there is a possibility that you might "miss" one... Bitcoin Core actually has 100's of private keys stored in the wallet.dat and it also uses "change" addresses (when spending coins), which you won't necessarily "see" in the application as they tend to be "hidden", but still a possibility that one of them contains some of your funds if you've ever sent coins from that wallet.

So, when exporting/importing individual keys to another app, it might not necessarily be an exact clone of the original wallet. However, if you simply copy the entire wallet.dat and open it with another copy of Bitcoin Core, it will be an exact clone.



No, you don't use WALLET_ADDRESS, you don't even need the WALLET_ADDRESS... Electrum will automagically derive the address from the private key...

So, in that window where it says "Enter a list of Bitcoin addresses (this will create a watching-only wallet), or a list of private keys.", you put:

The private key should start with a "K", "L" (or possibly a "5" if it is VERY old)


It isn't necessarily inherently "dangerous" per se... but more that it carries more "risk"... If you have unknown malware/keyloggers infecting your computer, they could detect private keys being copied to the clipboard or typed on the keyboard or even detected by a "screengrabber" that sends screenshots to the hackers etc.


If you have the time, the bandwidth and the available storage on your harddrive, I would personally recommend that you simply let Bitcoin Core finish syncing, then you can use it to safely send the funds wherever you want. You won't have to worry about potentially exposing to private keys to any unnecessary risk and you can be sure that you are seeing "total" balance contained within the wallet.

If you're desperately short of time, or don't have the available free disk space, to let Bitcoin Core finish syncing... exporting private keys is an option as long as you take adequate steps to protect the private keys. ie. don't enter them onto websites, verify any downloaded wallet software (like Electrum) is legit etc.

Does that require that you know the correct order of those 7 words? Or does it not matter?

It's an issue with the installer: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/6748

Basically, if Electrum is running when you try to install the update, the installer will complain that it can't remove files in use etc. However, if you close Electrum, then click "retry" on the installer, some things won't be cleaned up properly which can lead to weird issues like the exchange rate not showing properly.

Devs are aware of it as per the github issue linked above... and as ranochigo has noted, the simple fix is to simply shutdown Electrum, and then run the 4.0.5 installer again.

It's not actually plastic... it's stainless steel.

Essentially this "hardware wallet", is basically the equivalent of physical bitcoins... maybe best to be treated as a collectable?