[ANNOUNCE] Electrum - Lightweight Bitcoin Client

[dooglus]

I just tried electrum for the first time and have the following observations:

I tried using 'electrum import' while the client was running.  It let me, and told me it had succeeded, but the balance displayed in the running client didn't change.  I shut down and restarted the client, and the balance still didn't change.  I shut down the client, then reimported the key, then started the client and then the updated balance showed up.

It seems that if I import a key while the client is running, then close the client, the imported key gets overwritten.  I would suggest either not allowing keys to be imported while the client is running, or have the running client notice the imported key and update itself accordingly.

Also, importing a key shouldn't require me to specify the address as well as the private key.  The address can be found from the private key, and in fact that is done in the code to tell me if I type the wrong address.  I'd rather just type the private key.

Other than that it seems to be working well so far.

[1714209237]

1714209237

[Tuxavant]

Vietnamese translations have been added to the wiki.

[ThomasV]

Vietnamese translations have been added to the wiki.

that's great!

if you use linux, you can try them right away.
download the electrum archive, untar it and in the directory type:

Code:

python mki18n.py
sudo python setup.py install
export LANGUAGE=vn
electrum

[Xenland]

If this has already been asked just let me know and I'll look harder but...

How is a HTTP request constructed to query electrum servers? (For example, are their get/post variables involved or anything of that nature?)

[dooglus]

You can see how it's done here:

  https://gitorious.org/electrum/electrum/blobs/a5152462135b6e132c6776a50675eed15e0c46a2/lib/interface.py#line184

The data is sent using a POST request, and is JSON encoded.

[Xenland]

You can see how it's done here:

  https://gitorious.org/electrum/electrum/blobs/a5152462135b6e132c6776a50675eed15e0c46a2/lib/interface.py#line184

The data is sent using a POST request, and is JSON encoded.

Kudos mate!

[Tuxavant]

What do you think of a "half-offline" wallet feature?

The client would never write the seed to the electrum.dat file. The only way you could spend money would be to enter in your key passphrase at startup. When the app closes, the electrum.dat file gets deleted.

Also, can we get the columns in the displays to sort when the headers are clicked?

[Xenland]

What do you think of a "half-offline" wallet feature?

The client would never write the seed to the electrum.dat file. The only way you could spend money would be to enter in your key passphrase at startup. When the app closes, the electrum.dat file gets deleted.

Also, can we get the columns in the displays to sort when the headers are clicked?

What's wrong with mktx?
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Electrum#List_of_commands

[Xenland]

What do you think of a "half-offline" wallet feature?

The client would never write the seed to the electrum.dat file. The only way you could spend money would be to enter in your key passphrase at startup. When the app closes, the electrum.dat file gets deleted.

Also, can we get the columns in the displays to sort when the headers are clicked?

What's wrong with mktx?
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Electrum#List_of_commands

Whooops ment to say sendtx

[Tuxavant]

Because currently, restoring the wallet writes the seed to disk, specifically a file that can easily be identified as a wallet (trying to avoid that).

The ideas that you can use your wallet on a corporate asset and not have to worry about IT finding a wallet file later and taking the money. With this solution, the seed/passphrase stays in memory. I know there may be remnants in a swap file and keyloggers rule out any security, but it's just one more level of protection on a "public" computer.

I seem to recall a command that, if a key was not present, it would prompt you for it... I can't find the documentation for that or what exactly it was for. That may be the solution. Someone help me recall it plz?

[ThomasV]

Because currently, restoring the wallet writes the seed to disk, specifically a file that can easily be identified as a wallet (trying to avoid that).

how about :

Code:

electrum -w /dev/shm/wallet

[flatfly]

Great! I guess it's donation time again for both of you : )

@flatfly: this font is also cool.

@ThomasV: any idea why do i get this message occasionally? It happens once out of 10 times in general... it also happened before, so it's not about this brand new build.

Code:

---------------------------
Error
---------------------------
error: error: transaction rejected by memorypool: Transaction not accepted to memory pool.
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
---------------------------
OK   
---------------------------

I click OK and try sending again and then it works...

I have found that this always happens when trying to 2 payments too fast (within 5-10 seconds of each other)

[Tuxavant]

how about :

Code:

electrum -w /dev/shm/wallet

Wow, Never new about this. I always just mounted a /dev/ram device. That's really cool and easy!

But, it's a Linux only solution. Installing a windows ram disk app would require rights a regular user in a corporate environment might not have. Perhaps this is just something to add to your roadmap and implemented later since we're still living in a mostly nerd bitcoin community, but I think this will be a useful feature to help protect people's money when they need access on semi-trusted multip-user systems.

[Xenland]

I'm having difficulties finding the scripts for running an electrum server?

[Tuxavant]

http://gitorious.org/electrum/server

[Xenland]

http://gitorious.org/electrum/server

Ah! was looking in the wrong spot -- thanks mate!

[Xenland]

Might I suggest you add a

Code:

sys.exit(0)

at the end of the while(True) in the watch_addresses file and then add an option to allow the script to end after its looped?

I've been trying to call this python script from another language and it just sits there awaiting for the connection to end and it never did i spent hours trying to figure out why. Anyways my situation is probably really specific but still adding a comment in thurr to reduce future programmers frustration or something. anyways great work mate, I've learned a lot about bitcoin tearing your library apart!

[ThomasV]

Might I suggest you add a

Code:

sys.exit(0)

at the end of the while(True) in the watch_addresses file and then add an option to allow the script to end after its looped?

I've been trying to call this python script from another language and it just sits there awaiting for the connection to end and it never did i spent hours trying to figure out why. Anyways my situation is probably really specific but still adding a comment in thurr to reduce future programmers frustration or something. anyways great work mate, I've learned a lot about bitcoin tearing your library apart!

indeed, an option to end the loop would be useful
In fact I am thinking of making it a more general purpose program, that calls a command-line program each time an address receives or sends a payment
Something similar to the linux "at" command.

[Xenland]

Might I suggest you add a

Code:

sys.exit(0)

at the end of the while(True) in the watch_addresses file and then add an option to allow the script to end after its looped?

I've been trying to call this python script from another language and it just sits there awaiting for the connection to end and it never did i spent hours trying to figure out why. Anyways my situation is probably really specific but still adding a comment in thurr to reduce future programmers frustration or something. anyways great work mate, I've learned a lot about bitcoin tearing your library apart!

indeed, an option to end the loop would be useful
In fact I am thinking of making it a more general purpose program, that calls a command-line program each time an address receives or sends a payment
Something similar to the linux "at" command.

Would be interesting to see how that comes out, I don't know python well enough to contribute to anything but I see the amount of time it took to create everything..

I'm having an issue on an angstrom linux flavor maybe you could help me out with this Its a fresh install python version 2.7.2 and i installed electrum with no bugs(with the edcsa, slowaes packages installed) but i get the following error

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "setup.py", line 18, in <module>
    for lang in os.listdir('locale'):
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'locale'

What shall I do?  (I'm guessing for a quick fix I should look through the python and set the locale but i thought you'd like to know bow this error.)

[ThomasV]

Might I suggest you add a

Code:

sys.exit(0)

at the end of the while(True) in the watch_addresses file and then add an option to allow the script to end after its looped?

I've been trying to call this python script from another language and it just sits there awaiting for the connection to end and it never did i spent hours trying to figure out why. Anyways my situation is probably really specific but still adding a comment in thurr to reduce future programmers frustration or something. anyways great work mate, I've learned a lot about bitcoin tearing your library apart!

indeed, an option to end the loop would be useful
In fact I am thinking of making it a more general purpose program, that calls a command-line program each time an address receives or sends a payment
Something similar to the linux "at" command.

Would be interesting to see how that comes out, I don't know python well enough to contribute to anything but I see the amount of time it took to create everything..

I'm having an issue on an angstrom linux flavor maybe you could help me out with this Its a fresh install python version 2.7.2 and i installed electrum with no bugs(with the edcsa, slowaes packages installed) but i get the following error

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "setup.py", line 18, in <module>
    for lang in os.listdir('locale'):
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'locale'

What shall I do?  (I'm guessing for a quick fix I should look through the python and set the locale but i thought you'd like to know bow this error.)

just create the locale dir, or run mki18n.py
(I hope you have this problem because you are using the current git version)