[ANNOUNCE] Electrum - Lightweight Bitcoin Client

[flatfly]

My previous post was a little too short, but I don't believe what I said was "completely misleading."  Nowadays a good antivirus protects against many types of malicious code and behavior, not just "viruses." It uses a number of different methods to detect such threats, not only definition files but also heuristics and crowd sourcing (and the concept of "file reputation").

VirusTotal is not an AV but a "metaservice" that scans files using the top 40 AV solutions simultaneously. A clean report from VT, generally gives a pretty good idea if a file/publisher is clean or not (especially if said a rescan is performed after a few months) - that said, of course it's not a perfect guarantee ( it will never be able to catch everything, that's why there are zero-days).

Anyway, I do agree that it makes more sense to recommend slush's version to end-users as the build process is more transparent.

I will pull the plug on public builds and will continue to make builds for my own usage as that is what I'm most comfortable with. Also I will continue to contribute little bugfixes and improvements to Electrum so that won't change!
 

[1714249990]

1714249990

[ThomasV]

Nowadays a good antivirus protects against many types of malicious code and behavior, not just "viruses."

Have you ever heard about Rice's theorem in computability theory? It states that no computer program will ever be able to reliably detect "malware". Never.
This is true for well defined types of "malware", where the evil actions you want to detect are known in advance. So, I let you imagine how true it remains for definitions of "malware" that the antivirus programmer had no idea about, such as stealing bitcoins.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem

Antiviruses will never work, no matter how smart they become. The whole approach of fighting viruses with antiviruses is doomed to fail.
The correct way to fight viruses is to fix your operating system.


Anyway, thak you for your contributions to Electrum. I appreciate your efforts.

[EagleTM]

Dont lose heart, and dont be put off by the lack of recognition   Many people appreciate your work. I will miss your builds with the console.

I recognize the achievements! Ideally - and this is a time constraint for flatfly - things that make his build special should go upstream to the project at some point. That's how open source works. There are some limitations when it comes to distributing commercial software (thanks to IP laws) but I'm sure they can somehow be worked around.

[btcven]

Would Electrum face his own Cydia? With vitamined Electrum versions?

As with Cydia releases for iOS, be careful using them! In the future some features will be ported from that unofficial releases.

[zebedee]

For those of you using NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, or pkgsrc, I've created a package of electrum 1.6.1 in the pkgsrc-wip project.

There are 3 new packages I added:

  wip/electrum
  wip/py-slowaes
  wip/py-ecdsa

Enjoy!

[Stn]

Freshly installed Windows standalone client. Where is the wallet file located? Can't find it.

[bitcats]

Freshly installed Windows standalone client. Where is the wallet file located? Can't find it.

As this is consistently asked, the answer should eventually be put in the electrum wiki and/or the documentation.

[btcven]

Freshly installed Windows standalone client. Where is the wallet file located? Can't find it.

On Windows

- Show hidden files
- Go to \Users\YourUserName\AppData\Local\Electrum

On Mac

- Open Finder
- shift+cmd+G (Go > Go to folder) and type ~/.electrum


Update: now this instructions are listed in the Electrum wiki page https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Electrum#Wallet_File

[zxyzxy]

using windows client, so i think im screwed here, but well.. lets try this.. is there a way how i can receive funds to my default wallet via private key?

[bitcats]

using windows client, so i think im screwed here, but well.. lets try this..

Why screwed??

[ErebusBat]

using windows client, so i think im screwed here, but well.. lets try this.. is there a way how i can receive funds to my default wallet via private key?

What do you mean via private key?  People don't send funds to a private key (that is why it is private).

Do you mean to say that you have only a private key and have lost the matching public key?  If that is the case then you can enter the private key at brainwallet.org and it will decode the public key for you.

[ThomasV]

you can enter the private key at brainwallet.org and it will decode the public key for you.

please stop it. do not encourage newbies to give their private keys to third party websites.

you can import a private key in the GUI with Electrum 1.6.1, see the 'import/export' tab in your settings

[ErebusBat]

you can enter the private key at brainwallet.org and it will decode the public key for you.

please stop it. do not encourage newbies to give their private keys to third party websites.

you can import a private key in the GUI with Electrum 1.6.1, see the 'import/export' tab in your settings

It is all JavaScript based.  I have been in the code and I am comfortable recommending it.

[ThomasV]

It is all JavaScript based. 

precisely...

[nimda]

It is all JavaScript based. 

precisely...

Precisely, what? It works without an internet connection. Don't confuse javascript, the fundamental client-side language, with java, the proprietary software which runs in a virtual machine made of security swiss cheese.

[ErebusBat]

I am not getting into a language war and in general I understand Thomas' concern about the possibility of stealing data.

My point was that I have worked in the brain wallet code base, it is hosted on github, and is unlikely to contain any backdoor.

I have also used it from a local file, which invokes the browsers same origin policy so it would be difficult to traverse that.

[btcven]

I am not getting into a language war and in general I understand Thomas' concern about the possibility of stealing data.

My point was that I have worked in the brain wallet code base, it is hosted on github, and is unlikely to contain any backdoor.

I have also used it from a local file, which invokes the browsers same origin policy so it would be difficult to traverse that.

I'm with ThomasV here, if you copy your private key and enter it into a website it will be in your clipboard, also in your Browser History (somewhen), form auto fill (if it is enabled), you could have one of those lovely emoticons extension/toolbar continuously watching while you type in your browser... And so on.

Why not just import the privkey to Electrum or any other desktop client (in a clean OS, I mean don't do it in your lil' sis Justin Bieber powered animated wallpaper laptop!). And then send your coins to your current wallet?

[sacko]

I believe there is an Electrum client for Litecoin, but I'm not entirely sure.

there is a fork on github: https://github.com/litecoin-project/Electrum
put i think nothing has be done for this.
electrum for litecoin would be a HUGE move forward for Litecoin!!!
what shall we do to get that live? unfortunately i dont know what to change for this to work..

[Tachikoma]

I believe there is an Electrum client for Litecoin, but I'm not entirely sure.

there is a fork on github: https://github.com/litecoin-project/Electrum
put i think nothing has be done for this.
electrum for litecoin would be a HUGE move forward for Litecoin!!!
what shall we do to get that live? unfortunately i dont know what to change for this to work..

Coblee actually did two seperate Electrum forks for Litecoin. The first one simply hacked in Litecoin support, the other one was a port of Electrum with multi-coin support. The latter never got finished and the first one has no working servers available. 

[crazy_rabbit]

Has anyone tried to get Electrum working on the One Laptop per child laptops?