Do you think Electrum can meet our project needs ?

[cooljojo]

Hello everyone !

We'd like to know if Electrum can meet our business needs in the realization of a part of our project.

We own a mining farm and our company's project is to create a backoffice through which our customers buy mining power and then perceive return on investment in Bitcoin. We have our own developers's team and have already developed the majority of the project as a PHP/Mysql application. But there is one last part to be developed: The earnings withdrawal function. This requires the implementation of a Wallet hosting service and the use of API to develop our "payment system". Security is at the heart of our project.
We'd like to know if it's possible to elaborate a secured architecture for our Bitcoin transactions with Electrum wallet service ? 

Details: Our customers can't withdraw directly because we have an "Validation team" who is responsible to receive&validate any withdraw request from our customers and that, through a dedicated "Validators" backoffice.

The architecture (to improve) that we imagine :
- A Hardware Wallet. (will keep the majority of the Bitcoins of our company).
- Hot Wallets. (for the customers).
- Watch-only wallets. (between the HD and hots wallets, and will check the balance of our custormers's wallets).
- A payment system (that our developers will develop using the electrum's API) that will retrieve the amount of bitcoin from our HD Wallet that our customers are requesting, and then send to their respective hot wallets.

Can someone confirm me if this is doable with Electrum for our business project please ? 

[cooljojo]

A little bump, thank you

[kolloh]

I'm pretty sure you should be able to accomplish this using Electrum and its API. I'd guess that most others trying to do a project like this would use bitcoind but I don't really see any reasons you couldn't use Electrum to accomplish this. You wouldn't be able to use HD wallets with bitcoind anyhow.

[Joel_Jantsen]

Simple Answer : Yes
Complex Answer : No
Btw you're planning to run a mining Ponzi ,isn't it ? Renting hash power and anything along those lines just looks like a ponzi anyway.
Now if you're running a serious business,it's always better to use your own API,bitcoind and Json RPC's.Why ? It's reliable and gives you more control over your transactions.
I haven't seen their API documentation yet but incase if you're working in an agile team and speed is your main concerns you might as well use Electrum.

[cooljojo]

[Sorry for my bad english, it's not my native language]

Thank you for your answer kolloh !
I'm not an expert in this field and I'm not a developer as well, so I didn't check Bitcoind in details. But security is at the heart of our projet. This is why we want to integrate a HD wallet for our company to keep all the bitcoin generated by our mining farm. So if with Bitcoind we can't use HD wallet, then it's really not the path to follow for us.
I rethought about our payment system, and I thought that would be better if our customers could use their own wallet ID (that they have already created elsewhere) to receive their earnings. I imagine that the user would direclty insert their own Wallet ID in the profile section of their Backoffice, and that would be the default wallet to which our payment system would send the user's earnings after the submimission of a withdraw request.

I'm really concerned about the Security, and i was wondering if you think that it'd be more secure to integrate a HSM in the heart of our payment system ?
I'd imagine something like this: [Requests engine] ----> [HSM] <---- [HD Wallet]
-Requests engine: API with a view of all customer’s balances | manage payment requests  from customers.
-HD Wallet: Secure device which keep the majority of our bitcoins.

________

Thank you Joel_Jantsen !
Indeed, what you say is true. We were amazed by the number of scams around the web ! In this context, it has not been easy because we have been "fighting" since 2016. Our projet go beyond a simple investment platform and we did our best to create something different with a full dedicated team. Today we are proud to have finally won the trust of our visitors. Most are today our customers and our community, which is built around human values, grows little by little. It is really something that we had to forge, and that is not so easily won in such an area.
There's a lot of scam and it's sad to see that, while crypto-currency is a good thing for all. However, my team and I have built our project on fundamental pillars in the business world and we believe that will make the difference in a near future.

Yes, we're running a serious business quite unique (I'm sorry because I can't reveal all details). On the aspect of the mining farm, we're ok. But our will to share our earnings push us to create a platform in order to make that possible. And this where we lack of experience/resources, and we're still open to hire developer to join our developpers's team.
You're perspicacious because we are effectively quite in a rush. But our main concerned is Security which is very important for our project. And as Electrum supports HD wallet, I will take your advice to go for Electrum.
As the amount of BTC transactions will be really massive, do you think that will be a problem with such a configuration ?

Thank you again !

[cooljojo]

Thank you very much for your answer nerioseole !  

I suspected something like that but I wasn't sure about it as I'm new. What you said is logical & comprehensible, and put me in a deep thoughts process...
Running our own Electrum-servers is not a bad idea, and if we create a well-thoughts system architecture behind it, that could enforce our security as you said.
By the way, I still didn't find the maximum number of transaction that Electrum can managed. I have to dig deeper then. And what you said about transactions slowing down the software really worried me... I'll have to find information about that, thank you !
I don't know if you (or someone else) could help us on that please >

>Would you know a website which explains how to create secure properly a cryptocurrency payment system, please ?
(It could also be some case studies that would show some secure system/network architecture for bitcoin transaction).

I think I really need first, to gather some useful information and really understand it before trying to elaborate anything.

I really thank the community very much for your help in advance  

[Atomicat]

If your going to be running your own Electrum-Servers you would still need to be running bitcoind on the servers so I don't see why you prefer Electrum for your project.
You could communicate directly to the bitcoind running on your servers and remove Electrum from the picture.

Have a look at the APIs supported by bitcoind: https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-reference#bitcoin-core-apis

From my understanding, Electrum is intended to be a lightweight client and supporting *really massive* transactions defeats the purpose of being a lightweight client.

[cooljojo]

Thank you very much Atomicat !

I didn't know Electrum was built to be lightweight and that would change all the picture as you said.

By gathering information about Bitcoind, I found BitcoinJS which seems to be quite simple & well used. The code is optimized so I was wondering if somone would know if I should rather go for bitcoinJS instead please ?

I lack of experience and knowledge in those technologies, that's why I'm asking by hoping that someone who have already an idea about it.

Thank you again ~