Signing a Paper Wallet via Electrum (no sweep - just sign)

[tapunan]

Hi .. I might be doing the Stellar Bitcoin giveaway (depending on how I end up feeling about their Facebook verification thing) and one of the steps is signing/verifying a message.

All my bitcoins are in a paper wallet and I want it to stay that way. I researched on steps to signing a message using my paper wallet and someone recommended importing the keys to a Electrum - but no detailed steps was given. I researched as I haven't used Electrum before and I want to verify if these steps would work - I use Electrum in Tails ver 2.8 (will update to 2.10 later) :

1. Use Tails -> start Electrum -> Restore using the Private Key of my paper wallet (all with my Internet Off)
2. Go to 'Addresses' -> Choose my Paper wallet address -> right-click and choose 'Sign/Verify Message'
3. Copy whatever message I need to sign into the popup wizard and sign it
3. Copy 'Signature' out (with notepad, by hand)
4. Delete my paper wallet address from Electrum

Again, my objective is to just sign/verify the message. I still want to keep whatever bitcoin I have in the paper wallet address so I don't want to 'Sweep' my paper wallet.

[pooya87]

0. download Tails
0.1. verify its signature
0.2. disconnect internet.
0.3. copy the message in a text file and have at the ready for copy pasting later
0.4. burn Tails on a DVD or put it on a USB for live mode.
1. the same but in restore step you have to make a new wallet, you can't import in an existing wallet that has a seed. in electrum File > New> give it a name > Standard wallet (option 1) > Use public or private key (option 3) > paste your key and click next
2. same
3&3. same
4. if you didn't change anything about Tails like adding persistence to it then it will delete everything itself. just shut down.

[tapunan]

Thanks, did everything but when I click the 'Sign' button I get this error message "False,0" .. I looked around and saw some people have the same issue before but it's supposed to be fixed.

I did this under the latest Tails 3 version, if I remember correctly the version of Electrum here is 2.7.9. Anywbody have an idea on this error ?

[pooya87]

it is the problem with your version, it is an old one and has this bug [1]. if you had anything above 2.7.13 this wouldn't have happened [2]! upgrade to the latest version and it will be fixed.

[1] https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/2034
[2] https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/commit/a660590a70cacd86e785a7f307ad141bc78b6406

[tapunan]

Thanks, I installed Ubuntu and signed the message there using the latest Electrum wallet - all working now.