Electrum use compressed keys by default?

[Dabs]

Hi,

Can we have electrum use compressed keys by default?

I know I can import compressed private keys.

Main reason is so I can use electrum's master public key feature and work with offline transactions from a cold wallet computer.

Also would appreciate it if there is some sort of Coin Control here. These are the only things keeping me on bitcoin-qt.

[Abdussamad]

Can you explain how compressed keys relates to offline wallets? Electrum has a guide on how to use it for offline transactions:

http://electrum.org/offline_wallets.html

Coin control of sorts does exist. Enable expert mode in preferences and you'll be able to freeze or prioritize addresses. So you can freeze the addresses you don't want to be used as inputs to a transaction and prioritize the one that you do. I don't think there is a way to control where change goes though.

[Dabs]

Well, because electrum currently uses uncompressed keys (the private keys that start with number 5) when you create a new wallet, it defaults to creating all keys deterministically using uncompressed keys for the master public seed.

Your default offline wallet uses the same keys. Your online watching only wallet uses uncompressed keys.

I'm not sure if I import a whole bunch of compressed keys I generated if I can make electrum see only the public addresses.

Is it possible for electrum to import public key bitcoin addresses only? Here is what I want to do:

2 computers. Offline and Online.
Online computer has watch only public key. I can create a transaction here, but it will have to be signed by the offline computer.
Offline computer has private key. It can sign the transaction generated from the online computer.

I want the addresses to be used to be compressed keys. The private keys begin with letter L or letter K.

[Abdussamad]

I think I understand what you mean. You want to import watch only version of your 1lotto.. addresses to an electrum wallet to craft transactions that you then sign with an offline wallet that has the private keys. I don't think you can do this with electrum. It only supports watch only versions of its own deterministic wallets.

BTW public key and bitcoin address are different. The address is actually a hash with checksum of the public key.

[ThomasV]

electum 1.9 (the upcoming release) will use BIP32, and therefore compressed keys

[Dabs]

Hi ThomasV, can you also include Coin Control as seen in bitcoin-qt coin control? The specific feature I want is to be able to select a particular unspent input, and to also specify the change address.

[Dabs]

BTW public key and bitcoin address are different. The address is actually a hash with checksum of the public key.

I understand the difference. Sometimes I mix up the two though, when I mean the other. Completely cold addresses (never spent from it) don't have public keys in the blockchain yet.