[ANNOUNCE] Electrum - Lightweight Bitcoin Client

[SebastianJu]

... but you still have your brainwallet, you will be able to recover your funds?

brainwallet ??

You obviously still haven't read the instructions:

Maybe you should read the instructions first: https://electrum.orain.org/wiki/Two-factor_authentication

So a 2fa electrum wallet has no brainwallet. The normal one has and thats the source of the seed, right? I wonder why the multisig one doesnt have when the wiki states that the seed contains all three keys.

BTW:  less than 3 pennies per transactions for using the service is still much cheaper than buying a $120 Trezor...

Its huge. Especially for a service you get everywhere for free. :| Though thats a decision of the creators.

[1714078811]

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[1714078811]

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[SebastianJu]

Ok, thats something important to know. So when the service dies, but you still have your brainwallet, you will be able to recover your funds? I mean without the service could you create the multisig addresses again at all? I would not know what to do just in the case.

Again: YES. How many times will I need to repeat that?
Yes, you can recover your wallet from its seed, at any time, even if the service dies. It is fully deterministic.

Competing services may not have that feature, but Electrum does have it.
I would certainly not propose that service in Electrum if it was not the case.

Is it your service?

The service is operated by TrustedCoin.
The fees paid by users are shared between Electrum Technologies and TrustedCoin.
The service was developed by both companies.

If not, why didnt you implement 2FA normally? Not being able to log into the account or send transactions without 2FA should have been sufficient i guess. Why not going that route? The service costs money for each transaction on top. Because of that i doubt many will use it.

what the F*** do you mean by 'normally'? If you mean 'without a remote server', then you can create a multisig wallet with Electrum, and sign transactions with two devices; it will not cost you anything. It even works with android.

OTOH, if you want the convenience of someone else hosting and securing a cosigning key for you, then someone has to pay for the server operation, and for the people developing the service. I do not want to run that kind of service on VC money (like BitGo does), because I want Electrum to remain independent, and because it does not work in the long run (what do you do once you run out of VC money?)

Well, i admit im a bit astonished how aggressive you get only because i made a wrong assumption. Yes, the wallet can be retrieved. Ok now?

And "normally"? 2FA is only a kind of second password whose source is held independent from the wallets host computer. So under a normal implementation i would understand that, with the current setup, a transaction only can be sent when the 2FA code is correct and the password too. Though when i think about the implementation i see why it might not work that way. If the wallet checks for a correct 2FA then the code has to be in the wallet, which makes it attackable. Encryption would only work with a static password too. So even when encrypting the 2FA with the norma password, at that point an attacker on the computer might be able to get in.

Letting a server check brings you back to point TrustedCoin.

Guess 2FA only makes sense for a website since its unlikely that it gets hacked. So only protecting things outside of the website.

[Muhammed Zakir]

... but you still have your brainwallet, you will be able to recover your funds?

brainwallet ??

You obviously still haven't read the instructions:

Maybe you should read the instructions first: https://electrum.orain.org/wiki/Two-factor_authentication

So a 2fa electrum wallet has no brainwallet. The normal one has and thats the source of the seed, right? I wonder why the multisig one doesnt have when the wiki states that the seed contains all three keys.

 -snip-

Electrum does not have a brainwallet. Brainwallet and hierarchical deterministic seed are different. Please read https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Brainwallet and https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deterministic_wallet.

[SebastianJu]

... but you still have your brainwallet, you will be able to recover your funds?

brainwallet ??

You obviously still haven't read the instructions:

Maybe you should read the instructions first: https://electrum.orain.org/wiki/Two-factor_authentication

So a 2fa electrum wallet has no brainwallet. The normal one has and thats the source of the seed, right? I wonder why the multisig one doesnt have when the wiki states that the seed contains all three keys.

 -snip-

Electrum does not have a brainwallet. Brainwallet and hierarchical deterministic seed are different. Please read https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Brainwallet and https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deterministic_wallet.

What is written at Deterministic wallet does not match how i created my electrum wallets some years ago. I still have a key in keepass saying brainwallet electrum and its a lot of words. It was always said that is a brainwallet so i dont know what you say i have. Brainwallet was a number of words you theoretically can keep in your mind and thats all you need to restore your electrum. So did this change or is this about semantics, like these words are named another way or brainwallet is specificially something different?

[Abdussamad]

So did this change or is this about semantics, like these words are named another way or brainwallet is specificially something different?

It's about semantics. When people say brain wallet they usually mean something that they came up with that is a series of words that are human generated. Electrum mnemonic is computer generated and random so it is safe. Human generated words are not random so they are unsafe. Brain wallet is a confusing term so better to call it a mnemonic or seed rather than a brain wallet.

I usually point people to this excellent rant by G Maxwell

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=311000.msg3345309#msg3345309

He mentions electrum mnemonics in the last paragraph.

(oh and BTW years ago electrum allowed you to create your own mnemonic i.e. a brain wallet but it's no longer permitted. we may still be able to help you recover your old brain wallet. create a separate thread about it and mention when you created the wallet and what version of electrum you used)

[SebastianJu]

So did this change or is this about semantics, like these words are named another way or brainwallet is specificially something different?

It's about semantics. When people say brain wallet they usually mean something that they came up with that is a series of words that are human generated. Electrum mnemonic is computer generated and random so it is safe. Human generated words are not random so they are unsafe. Brain wallet is a confusing term so better to call it a mnemonic or seed rather than a brain wallet.

I usually point people to this excellent rant by G Maxwell

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=311000.msg3345309#msg3345309

He mentions electrum mnemonics in the last paragraph.

(oh and BTW years ago electrum allowed you to create your own mnemonic i.e. a brain wallet but it's no longer permitted. we may still be able to help you recover your old brain wallet. create a separate thread about it and mention when you created the wallet and what version of electrum you used)

Ah ok. I always wondered how someone will remind such a long list of random words. A password sentence containing special signs and lower und uppercase would look way safer than that. Though im not sure how long he would need to be.

Then its only a loosely habit that mnemonics are called brainwallet. It sounded logical since theoretical its made for humans to remind easily. I wonder why electrum uses mnemonic since its not intended to be reminded. A broader signs pool could raise security when it has to be saved in a password manager anyway. Though thats probably because of the origins... that you could edit the mnemonic.

[RappelzReborn]

Hi , is it me or Electrum new version have an ugly icon ? on the bottom when you launch it there is transparant Background but the Icon on the desktop have white background and the icon dosen't like look the older version 2.0 etc.. ? would be nice to fix that even if it's not that important , design a really important factor .

[gsupp]

Hi , is it me or Electrum new version have an ugly icon ? on the bottom when you launch it there is transparant Background but the Icon on the desktop have white background and the icon dosen't like look the older version 2.0 etc.. ? would be nice to fix that even if it's not that important , design a really important factor .

What version of Electrum and what operating system? I ask because the icon seems fine on my Linux install with electrum 2.4. If you're on Windows, maybe try clearing your icon cache: http://superuser.com/questions/499078/refresh-icon-cache-without-rebooting

[gsupp]

Is there any updated documentation on the label sync plugin? I found instructions here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=154144.0 but that seems to be for an older version of the plugin. The help icon references this page https://github.com/maran/electrum-sync-server but doesn't talk about usage of the client. Do I just click "force upload" on the computer that has my labels and then "force download" on my watching only wallets, without signing up for any account or entering an API key?

[SebastianJu]

Is there any updated documentation on the label sync plugin? I found instructions here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=154144.0 but that seems to be for an older version of the plugin. The help icon references this page https://github.com/maran/electrum-sync-server but doesn't talk about usage of the client. Do I just click "force upload" on the computer that has my labels and then "force download" on my watching only wallets, without signing up for any account or entering an API key?

As far as i used it yes. The only thing needed is the key and your wallet is recognized and the labels attached to the addresses and transactions are stored and recovered.

Though its of course that your labels are stored at a server, so centralized risk. I would prefer having the possibility to specify a file on my computer, i would store it in a cloud directory, and let my labels sync there. I would at least avoid that additional risk. I mean server owners has to give out the details when asked, especially in the US.

Saying that... the feature saved my labels often since the electrum database not seldom loses labels.

[SebastianJu]

Its strange that i only now get the idea to ask but can it be that certain servers are overloaded some time? Its not seldom that i cant connect to a server. Normally i dont use autoconnect because i think its way too risky spreading my addresses to every server that asks me to know my addresses. You never know who runs them. (Or do i miss that all electrum servers does now all wallet addresses anyway?)

Anyway... i use one server and another when this server doesnt work. And sometimes i cant reach them. It doesnt matter then when i restart electrum or let me give a new ip at AdvOr (thats an advanced TOR software).

So i wonder if server, 10k ones, are overloaded occassionally.

While trying to connect again i found that advor claims i should use socks4a instead socks5, because its safer. At least the log states:

[18:50:24] [warn] Your application (using socks5 to port 8444) is giving Tor only an IP address. Applications that do DNS resolves themselves may leak information. Consider using Socks4A (e.g. via privoxy or socat) instead. For more information, please see http://wiki.torproject.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#SOCKSAndDNS.

Im not sure if socks4a is better but i changed it in electrum, then tried to connect again. But it didnt work. I checked the advor log and it still claims i used socks5... repeating log entries. So i wonder if that setting wasnt changed correctly in electrum. Since when i restarted electrum again then it used socks4. And i could connect.

Socks5 should work too since i know i could connect with it before.

So does someone know what my connection problems could be? Getting a new ip from tor doesnt help and i see the logfile showing many connection attemps.

By saying that... another thing i wonder... when i want to connect to a server without autoconnect then the log of advor shows connection requests to many different ips. What i wonder is what that is.

[SebastianJu]

I want to add... i observed the log of advor a little bit more, when im logged on to a server and im doing nothing, why are there connection requests to other servers? Is electrum asking for a serverlist or something?

The log shows this:

Code:

[19:12:12] [proxy] Connection request for blockchain.info:443 .
[19:12:46] [proxy] Connection request for sync.bysh.me:8080 .
[19:12:47] [notice] [electrum-2.1-portable.exe PID: 13280, ID: 210] Downloading from http://sync.bysh.me:8080/label
[19:14:44] [proxy] Connection request for blockchain.info:443 .

Im connected to a different server though. The label sync is normal though, its enabled.

[tl121]

Its strange that i only now get the idea to ask but can it be that certain servers are overloaded some time? Its not seldom that i cant connect to a server. Normally i dont use autoconnect because i think its way too risky spreading my addresses to every server that asks me to know my addresses. You never know who runs them. (Or do i miss that all electrum servers does now all wallet addresses anyway?)

Anyway... i use one server and another when this server doesnt work. And sometimes i cant reach them. It doesnt matter then when i restart electrum or let me give a new ip at AdvOr (thats an advanced TOR software).

So i wonder if server, 10k ones, are overloaded occassionally.

I run a private Electrum server on a slow machine.  It can take several minutes to process a block.  If a couple of large blocks hit the network rapidly the server falls behind the network.  This results in my client showing "server lagging" messages or, in some cases, the server getting "desperate" to catch up and just ignoring my client(s).   This happened quite often during the spam/test'demonstartion in early July.  With a public server, there is also the possibility that your client is competing with other people's clients for attention and cycles from the server that you have selected.

IMO, server performance is the biggest downside of Electrum and it will only get worse if the network traffic increases naturally and the block size is raised.  On my machine, the Electrum server uses more than four times more processing time than the Bitcoin Core.

[SebastianJu]

Its strange that i only now get the idea to ask but can it be that certain servers are overloaded some time? Its not seldom that i cant connect to a server. Normally i dont use autoconnect because i think its way too risky spreading my addresses to every server that asks me to know my addresses. You never know who runs them. (Or do i miss that all electrum servers does now all wallet addresses anyway?)

Anyway... i use one server and another when this server doesnt work. And sometimes i cant reach them. It doesnt matter then when i restart electrum or let me give a new ip at AdvOr (thats an advanced TOR software).

So i wonder if server, 10k ones, are overloaded occassionally.

I run a private Electrum server on a slow machine.  It can take several minutes to process a block.  If a couple of large blocks hit the network rapidly the server falls behind the network.  This results in my client showing "server lagging" messages or, in some cases, the server getting "desperate" to catch up and just ignoring my client(s).   This happened quite often during the spam/test'demonstartion in early July.  With a public server, there is also the possibility that your client is competing with other people's clients for attention and cycles from the server that you have selected.

IMO, server performance is the biggest downside of Electrum and it will only get worse if the network traffic increases naturally and the block size is raised.  On my machine, the Electrum server uses more than four times more processing time than the Bitcoin Core.

Whats your server name? Its always good to know who handles your data.

And yes, i have not seldom the message that servers are lagging behind in the blocks.

I think it might be helpful when the serverwindow shows some serverstats too, like it was with emule servers. Its different here but one might be able to chose a server, as his standard that is constantly having ressources open. At least if you dont want to use autoconnect to stay more private.

But maybe the problem is the server code too? I mean ThomasV, i believe, changed the code of the client some months ago and now i have zero problems handling my huge electrum, containing thousands of addresses and transactions. Might be that the server software needs a performance update too.

At the end the electrum servers can serve a little bit as advertising. Means the server list is way bigger than before. That should lead to servers having more ressources free at least. If its not enough maybe allow a tab showing offers in electrum? Though i think devs wont accept that so it probably wont be a way out.

[OmegaStarScream]

Who could confirm that this is the current icon of Electrum ? I'am afraid that I'am not using the official version even if I downloaded from their official website some time ago .



EDIT : Why on the website latest version says : "2.4" while when you download from here (Windows) : https://electrum.org/#download It gives you 2.3.2    make no sense

[gsupp]

As far as i used it yes. The only thing needed is the key and your wallet is recognized and the labels attached to the addresses and transactions are stored and recovered.

Thanks, I tried it and it just worked like magic!   (remember to restart Electrum after enabling the labelsync plugin)

Though its of course that your labels are stored at a server, so centralized risk. I would prefer having the possibility to specify a file on my computer, i would store it in a cloud directory, and let my labels sync there. I would at least avoid that additional risk. I mean server owners has to give out the details when asked, especially in the US.

True, but the documentation says the labels are encrypted on the client side before being transmitted to the server. So there is protection, it's not like the information is stored in clear text on the server.

[HPt]

I just realized that the Master Public Keys of the three wallets I just created with Electrum 2.3.2 all start with "xpub661MyMwAqRbc...".
"xpub" certainly is a marker for identifying the String as a Master Public Key. However, do the other coinciding letters have to be always the same or do they result from a lack of entropy in the generation process?

[mustyoshi]

I just realized that the Master Public Keys of the three wallets I just created with Electrum 2.3.2 all start with "xpub661MyMwAqRbc...".
"xpub" certainly is a marker for identifying the String as a Master Public Key. However, do the other coinciding letters have to be always the same or do they result from a lack of entropy in the generation process?

Check the private keys to be sure.

[OmegaStarScream]

Could someone please answer my question above , If the latest version is 2.4 how come there is only 2.3.2 to download on the Download page on Electrum.org . I appreciate any answer ASAP because I need to switch to Electrum in few minuts (installing new windows version)
Also why the shortcut icon is different then before with a weird way 

[SebastianJu]

Is the encryption feature for an address (right click) electrum specific or is that standard for wallets now? How to use it, i mean usecases?

True, but the documentation says the labels are encrypted on the client side before being transmitted to the server. So there is protection, it's not like the information is stored in clear text on the server.

Yeah, i remember. Though i wonder if the actual addresses can be encrypted. Though maybe its really a complete file that is up- and downloaded so that the actual addresses arent known to the server.