Electrum Cold Storage

[eXpl0sive]

I'm not much familiar with Electrum, but do you have addresses on the "Addresses" tab?

Everything works exactly as you said, thank you very much. I did all the steps and am about to format the laptop for the second time to close the case.
I will be keeping the only-watch wallet on my online PC though, is that completely safe and work the same as checking up a transaction on blockchain?

Yep, watch address works exactly like you said. Enjoy and welcome to the club!

[1714019799]

1714019799

[1714019799]

1714019799

[Alphaz841x]

I'm not much familiar with Electrum, but do you have addresses on the "Addresses" tab?

Everything works exactly as you said, thank you very much. I did all the steps and am about to format the laptop for the second time to close the case.
I will be keeping the only-watch wallet on my online PC though, is that completely safe and work the same as checking up a transaction on blockchain?

Yep, watch address works exactly like you said. Enjoy and welcome to the club!

Thanks again, appreciate everything!

[eXpl0sive]

Bonus tip:

Electrum has one more useful feature. In future if you decide to spend some BTC from your cold wallet, you don't need to actually transfer that wallet to a "hot" PC (which is connected to internet).

You can actually keep your wallet offline, sign a transaction from that, take that transaction on a USB flash drive, and broadcast it from a "hot" PC.

This way, your wallet never touches a hot PC, so there's no risk of any wallets to be hacked or malware attacks.

Google for the exact procedure.

[BitcoinNewsMagazine]

If you are only interested in cold storage for bitcoin you can save yourself the hassle and just get a Digital BitBox hardware wallet for $78 shipped. I just set a friend up with one and it is very nice, the co-founder of the company is a Bitcoin Core developer.

[Alphaz841x]

It is possible for the host machine to infect the virtual machine, its harder the other way round. Anyways, it is possible for the malware to record the screen and get your 12 word seed. Use one of your pendrives to run a live copy of Tails and you will be fine.

You can do whatever you want with the VM and the pendrive, just remember the 12 word seed. It is the most important thing in the Electrum cold storage. Pen drives can be prone to failure so I don't really recommend using them.

So just download Tails and do exactly the same thing just with cold wallet(no internet) on Tails and watch-only on a PC that's online.
Then store the wallet file on pen drives and remember + save the 12 word seed on a piece of paper in case of emergency.

That's gonna work and will be safe, right? Also, just wondering if the 12 word seed is the only thing that is required to get into a wallet, then isn't that not so safe?
There has to be at least 50-100 milion of people using etherum so it shouldn't be so hard to get into at least 1 wallet with random 10-20 combinations you write, no?

Yup,, just boot tails as a LiveCD. The 12 words seed is all you need to get into your wallet.

You're not the only one that thinks that way so I'll break it down for you, its quite simple. For a 12 word seed, there are 2049 possible english words. With the English words, there are 2049^12 possible combination of seeds. Assuming I can bruteforce seeds at 1 million seeds per second, I can run through 3.1536x10^13 seeds per year. I'll be able to run through the possible seeds in 1.7365884x10^26 years. In comparison, we have  7.5 x 10^18 grains of sand on earth.

Hey, i just remembered your calculations and was wondering about one thing.
Technically even if you can run through 3.1536x10^13 seeds per year, if you consider that there may be around 10 milion of electrum wallets set-up with different seed phrases it only makes it 3153600 seed phrases to go through to find at least one working wallet.

[theta]

You're not the only one that thinks that way so I'll break it down for you, its quite simple. For a 12 word seed, there are 2049 possible english words. With the English words, there are 2049^12 possible combination of seeds. Assuming I can bruteforce seeds at 1 million seeds per second, I can run through 3.1536x10^13 seeds per year. I'll be able to run through the possible seeds in 1.7365884x10^26 years. In comparison, we have  7.5 x 10^18 grains of sand on earth.

Hey, i just remembered your calculations and was wondering about one thing.
Technically even if you can run through 3.1536x10^13 seeds per year, if you consider that there may be around 10 milion of electrum wallets set-up with different seed phrases it only makes it 3153600 seed phrases to go through to find at least one working wallet.

So it's not going to take 1.7365884x10^26 years but rather only 1.7365884x10^19 years. In other words not 3000000000000000000000000 times the age of the earth, but rather only 300000000000000000 times!

[Ratiocinator]

If you want to send coins, create an unsigned transaction from the watching only wallet, put it on a 2nd usb stick. Then boot your distro from the bootable pendrive, sign the transaction on the 2nd usb stick. Shutdown, reboot into your online OS and broadcast the transaction.

I get the parts involving setting-up an offline cold wallet and an online watch-only wallet, but not where sending BTC (to that two-part wallet) is concerned.

What you wrote, and what is included in online instructions for the Electrum wallet setup process, makes no sense to me.

I want to transfer BTC from the exchange where they were purchased into the Electrum cold wallet.  What you describe is sending money from the watching wallet. But how is this possible as the wallet has just been created and contains zero BTC? I guess I need some sort of address to give the exchange so it knows where to send my BTC to. Do I give the exchange the public key (xpub?) or a specially generated address? If the latter (the address) should that address be generated in the offline wallet or the online wallet? Also, for the same wallet (the same account, in essence) should that address always be used or can a new one be created - does a new one need to be created - for every transaction? Can I advertise that address for anyone to pay me their BTC?

This is basic stuff but it isn't clear to me, so I would be very grateful if you could clarify it.

Thanks.

P. S. I read that the xpub key should never be revealed, but was this a mistake on the writer's part; did the writer actually mean the private key (xprv)?

[eXpl0sive]

If you want to send coins, create an unsigned transaction from the watching only wallet, put it on a 2nd usb stick. Then boot your distro from the bootable pendrive, sign the transaction on the 2nd usb stick. Shutdown, reboot into your online OS and broadcast the transaction.

I get the parts involving setting-up an offline cold wallet and an online watch-only wallet, but not where sending BTC (to that two-part wallet) is concerned.

What you wrote, and what is included in online instructions for the Electrum wallet setup process, makes no sense to me.

I want to transfer BTC from the exchange where they were purchased into the Electrum cold wallet.  What you describe is sending money from the watching wallet. But how is this possible as the wallet has just been created and contains zero BTC? I guess I need some sort of address to give the exchange so it knows where to send my BTC to. Do I give the exchange the public key (xpub?) or a specially generated address? If the latter (the address) should that address be generated in the offline wallet or the online wallet? Also, for the same wallet (the same account, in essence) should that address always be used or can a new one be created - does a new one need to be created - for every transaction? Can I advertise that address for anyone to pay me their BTC?

This is basic stuff but it isn't clear to me, so I would be very grateful if you could clarify it.

Thanks.

P. S. I read that the xpub key should never be revealed, but was this a mistake on the writer's part; did the writer actually mean the private key (xprv)?

Before you dive into complex stuff (like making transactions from a cold/watch-only wallet), you need some reading to do on the basics. At least get yourself familier with the concept of public and private keys.

I will give you  head-start:
Every bitcoin address is a combination of public key and private key. You can generate this online or offine, doesn't matter. Both work same, however offline method is more secure.

To receive BTC, you just give the public address to someone (like an exchange). Never give private key to anyone.

It is not necessary to use different address for each transaction. Addresses can be re-used as much as you like, however some people like to keep changing addresses for privacy reasons.

[Ratiocinator]

Before you dive into complex stuff (like making transactions from a cold/watch-only wallet), you need some reading to do on the basics. At least get yourself familier with the concept of public and private keys.

I will give you  head-start:
Every bitcoin address is a combination of public key and private key. You can generate this online or offine, doesn't matter. Both work same, however offline method is more secure.

To receive BTC, you just give the public address to someone (like an exchange). Never give private key to anyone.

It is not necessary to use different address for each transaction. Addresses can be re-used as much as you like, however some people like to keep changing addresses for privacy reasons.

Thanks. I think it's clear enough for now. I'll generate the address in the offline/cold wallet and use it in the exchange. I'll start by transferring a tiny quantity of BTC just in case, then go through the steps of swapping code around the two wallets in order to register the transaction, et cetera.

I have read a bit (no pun intended) on this and probably know enough - now - to use the system, although I haven't much of a clue as to the ins and outs (like most, I imagine) - I probably never will know. BTC is so complex and so vulnerable to theft/hackers that I really don't know how it became so large a phenomenon.

[eXpl0sive]

Before you dive into complex stuff (like making transactions from a cold/watch-only wallet), you need some reading to do on the basics. At least get yourself familier with the concept of public and private keys.

I will give you  head-start:
Every bitcoin address is a combination of public key and private key. You can generate this online or offine, doesn't matter. Both work same, however offline method is more secure.

To receive BTC, you just give the public address to someone (like an exchange). Never give private key to anyone.

It is not necessary to use different address for each transaction. Addresses can be re-used as much as you like, however some people like to keep changing addresses for privacy reasons.

Thanks. I think it's clear enough for now. I'll generate the address in the offline/cold wallet and use it in the exchange. I'll start by transferring a tiny quantity of BTC just in case, then go through the steps of swapping code around the two wallets in order to register the transaction, et cetera.

I have read a bit (no pun intended) on this and probably know enough - now - to use the system, although I haven't much of a clue as to the ins and outs (like most, I imagine) - I probably never will know. BTC is so complex and so vulnerable to theft/hackers that I really don't know how it became so large a phenomenon.

I don't know how you got the idea of Bitcoin being hacked. It was never hacked. only the 3rd party sevices like exchanges got hacked and that's because of their own stupidity.

Just keep your private keys safe and you'll never have to worry.

[HCP]

I get the parts involving setting-up an offline cold wallet and an online watch-only wallet, but not where sending BTC (to that two-part wallet) is concerned.
What you wrote, and what is included in online instructions for the Electrum wallet setup process, makes no sense to me.

I want to transfer BTC from the exchange where they were purchased into the Electrum cold wallet.  What you describe is sending money from the watching wallet.

You just want to send some coins tO your wallet? That's easy... In the watching-only wallet, simply click on the "Receive" tab... it will give you an address to send to. You copy/paste that address to the withdraw/send page on the Exchange. They will then send the coins to that address.

You can get the address from either the offline wallet or the watching-only wallet. If they are configured correctly, they will generate identical addresses. The watching only wallet is essentially a "clone" of the offline wallet WITHOUT the private keys. I'd recommend using the watching-only wallet for the day to day tasks like generating addresses, checking balances etc. The offline wallet should only really be used for signing transactions.


ps. You should double check that your offline wallet and your watching only wallet ARE actually generating identical addresses before you start sending coins to your wallet

[Ratiocinator]

I don't know how you got the idea of Bitcoin being hacked. It was never hacked. only the 3rd party sevices like exchanges got hacked and that's because of their own stupidity.

Just keep your private keys safe and you'll never have to worry.

No, not Bitcoin/the blockchain itself being hacked. I mean the exchange. My BTC has just been left in my online account with the exchange, which apparently is unwise hence why I'm going to put my BTC offline in cold storage. I haven;t actually created any wallet at all, yet. I was given a wallet to download by the exchange but I think it's pretty much meaningless, and I certainly didn't know what to do with it or how it works.

[HCP]

My BTC has just been left in my online account with the exchange, which apparently is unwise hence why I'm going to put my BTC offline in cold storage.

You are now smarter than the average Bitcoin user

Yes, keeping coins on Exchanges "long term" is a terrible idea. As the saying goes "If you don't control the private keys, you don't control the coins"... and I'm not aware of ANY exchanges that give the users control of the private keys for their accounts.

[Ratiocinator]

You just want to send some coins tO your wallet? That's easy... In the watching-only wallet, simply click on the "Receive" tab... it will give you an address to send to. You copy/paste that address to the withdraw/send page on the Exchange. They will then send the coins to that address.

You can get the address from either the offline wallet or the watching-only wallet. If they are configured correctly, they will generate identical addresses. The watching only wallet is essentially a "clone" of the offline wallet WITHOUT the private keys. I'd recommend using the watching-only wallet for the day to day tasks like generating addresses, checking balances etc. The offline wallet should only really be used for signing transactions.


ps. You should double check that your offline wallet and your watching only wallet ARE actually generating identical addresses before you start sending coins to your wallet

Many thanks for this. I have read that Electron generates many addresses for receiving BTC. So, if the first one the offline wallet creates is the same as the first one the online wallet creates then all is well?

You are now smarter than the average Bitcoin user

Yes, keeping coins on Exchanges "long term" is a terrible idea. As the saying goes "If you don't control the private keys, you don't control the coins"... and I'm not aware of ANY exchanges that give the users control of the private keys for their accounts.

[/quote]

They definitely should.