Electrum not detecting seedless wallet, sending transactions anyway

[NoahTheTruest]

I followed instructions on the electrum site for creating an offline wallet, then using it's public key to "restore" a wallet on my online computer. I just tested the online (seedless) wallet to see what would happen if I sent bitcoin, however electrum never "queried for a location to save the transaction," it just sent the bitcoin.

What am I missing here? I noticed that the master public keys of my online and offline wallets are different, is this normal?

Is there a setting that I might have missed when restoring the online wallet?

Thank you.

[NoahTheTruest]

Okay, I think the issue is that I was supposed to create a "watching-only wallet," which isn't clear from the online tutorial. Then again, this step is probably implied to anyone who's not a newb.

[btcven]

Offline: Seed

Online: Master Public Key

To get the MPK you need to go to your offline wallet and use the menu option Wallet > Master Public Key, then copy it to a USB stick and restore from it in the Online PC

[ViperGeek]

Okay, I think the issue is that I was supposed to create a "watching-only wallet," which isn't clear from the online tutorial. Then again, this step is probably implied to anyone who's not a newb.

THANK YOU for clarifying this.  I too was following https://electrum.org/tutorials.html#restoring-seed and couldn't figure out how to create a seedless wallet (Windows).  I never thought about selecting "Create a watching-only version of an existing wallet", although as you said, thinking about it, it's "obvious"  .

It might be worthwhile to get this mentioned explicitly in the next revision of the tutorial.

- Dave