Unable to 'save' transaction in watch-only wallet. (for cold storage)

[Diaislief]

I set up a cold storage wallet on my raspberry pi (debian stretch with electrum-3.2.3) with a 12 word seed and some extra words of my own choosing.
Then, on my laptop, also running version 3.2.3, I set up a watch-only wallet with the master public key from my cold wallet. (transferred with QR code)

All seemed fine; I transferred some funds in there and they were received.

After this I wanted to test transferring funds out of the cold storage, but I got stuck when I wanted to create an unsigned transaction, as per the instructions.


After I go to the 'send' tab, fill it in, and press 'preview' the 'save' button in the popup window is greyed out. I was planning on using qr-codes, but my cold wallet wont let me sign this transaction either way.


When running electrum on the Raspberry form terminal i get the following messages:

[ecc] info: libsecp256k1 library not available, falling back to python-ecdsa. This means signing operations will be slower.
libEGL warning: DRI2: failed to authenticate
qt5ct: using qt5ct plugin
qt5ct: D-bus system tray: no
inotify_add_watch("/home/pi/.config/qt5ct failed: "no such file or directory")
qt5ct: D-bus global menu: no

When running electrum in Ubuntu I only get this message: [ecc] info: libsecp256k1 library not available, falling back to python-ecdsa. This means signing operations will be slower.

[1714688031]

1714688031

[1714688031]

1714688031

[1714688031]

1714688031

[Rath_]

There might be a different solution but I would try getting libsecp256k1 to work. Here you can find a short guide on installing it. You wrote that this message appeared on your Raspberry Pi so I assume that you had managed to prepare the transaction on the laptop and transfered it to your Pi.

[Diaislief]

No I didn't yet manage to prepare or transfer the transaction, i get stuck at the greyed out 'save' button; the message appears in terminal every time i start electrum.

(edit) when I try 'sudo apt-get install libsecp256k1-0' It says 'unable to locate the package
(edit2) on laptop that is.

[Diaislief]

Okay I managed to install libsecp256k1-0 on my raspberry pi.

On my laptop I tried to run many different versions of electrum; the older ones dont seem to synchronize, and the newer ones all have the same 'issue'.

I am not even sure if this is really the problem, because when I hover over the greyed out 'save' button it says you need to sign the transaction before saving it.
which makes me think the instructions here http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/coldstorage.html are wrong/outdated.

And all the versions I have tried on my laptop, after creating a new watch-only wallet from two different public master keys, from two different versions of electrum on my raspberry, have this 'save' button greyed out.

I have tried the 'export' and the QRcode options, but when I open these on my raspberry its gives 'status:signed' and transaction unrelated to your wallet.

It all seems very strange, and I will try to set up a cold wallet with tails or bitkey on my laptop  tomorrow. I hope to finally be able to set up a cold wallet. I have been struggling with this for a couple of days now; including the problems with python versions, installation, pgp verification etc. (

[pooya87]

first of all your problem had absolutely nothing to do with libsecp256k1, you didn't need to download that. the message you saw is just informing you that you don't have that optional library so Electrum is going to use the python library that it has always used which is slower since it is written in python compared to libsecp256k1 which is in C.

secondly you are confusing the button's purposes. you are correct that the docs page is outdated though. with current versions we have two buttons: Save and Export
Save button: is used to save the signed transactions in your wallet without broadcasting it. aka saving it locally in your wallet file.
Export button: which is on the left side alongside the QR button, is used to export signed or unsigned transactions.

so in that last step, instead of clicking save, click one of the other buttons depending on what you want to do:
Copy: to copy the hex in your clipboard and then paste it anywhere you like
QR: to see the QR code and be able to save,...
Export: to get a .txn file so that you can transfer that file to your cold storage and sign.

[Abdussamad]

I have tried the 'export' and the QRcode options, but when I open these on my raspberry its gives 'status:signed' and transaction unrelated to your wallet.

You use the export option in the preview window on the send tab not on any other transaction from the history tab. I'm guessing you exported an incoming transaction instead.

You export the unsigned tx to file, transfer that to the cold wallet, sign it, transfer the signed tx to the online pc and then broadcast it. You may be able to use QR codes to do some of this work instead but the idea is the same.

If the above is not working I suggest starting over by creating the watch only wallet again via file > new/restore, enter unique filename and click next. Proceed as before using your cold wallet xpub.

[Diaislief]

I am quite certain that I was not exporting received transactions; besides I have tried the process many times.

Anyway, I have reinstalled my raspberry and Installed electrum-3.0.1 now (which has the 'save' button for cold storage) and everything is working as it should.

I am aware of the vulnerability of these older versions, and on top of that I am using cold-storage anyways, but I was wondering if there is any other significant disadvantage to using an older version?

[pooya87]

~ I was wondering if there is any other significant disadvantage to using an older version?

there are quite a lot of disadvantages actually. from vulnerabilities that were fixed, bugs that were fixed, features added, improvements made,... for example there were some transaction parse error with certain SegWit transactions that was fixed in early 3.x versions, there was some issue with DNS resolution,...
you can always check the change log to see what you are missing by not upgrading though.
if you have 3.0.1 then you are missing this much: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/RELEASE-NOTES#L1-L303

[DireWolfM14]

Maybe I'm missing something technical, forgive me if so...  But, is this what you're seeing:



I've never needed to save the transaction at this point.  You can copy it, display the QR code, or export it from here.  Any of those three ways are capable of transferring the transaction to your cold wallet.

I believe the Save button only activates when you're importing transactions.

[pooya87]

I believe the Save button only activates when you're importing transactions.

Save button only activates when your transaction that you are viewing in this window is actually signed. if you move your mouse over it, i believe it will show you a popup message saying the transaction needs to be signed.

[DireWolfM14]

I believe the Save button only activates when you're importing transactions.

Save button only activates when your transaction that you are viewing in this window is actually signed. if you move your mouse over it, i believe it will show you a popup message saying the transaction needs to be signed.

Thanks for the correction.  I also see now that you had already figured out what the OP was doing wrong and described it in this post.

[Abdussamad]

OP says he used export button.

edit: offline signing works fine on testnet.

edit 2: OP you installed 3.0.1 on both the offline and online systems? I ask because transactions generated by 3.2.3 can't be signed by 3.0.1. They changed the format for saved transactions in 3.2.0 https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/RELEASE-NOTES

[Diaislief]

I did try the export button and qr code, but those transactions could not be signed by the offline wallet.

I think maybe what happened had to do with the fact that I first tried to install 3.3.3 on the raspberry, which didn't work because of the correct python version being unavailable, which maybe created some stuff in the .electrum folder that didn't really work with the older versions. I am not sure.

I am not sure which version I used for the online side, because I just used the latest version of tails and didn't really check it. Come to think of it, I am not sure if I verified the image. I will sort that out. What is the overall opinion about tails around here? With electrum being preinstalled it makes verification a bit iffy.
I guess I could verify the transaction on my cold storage, and after signing an extra time on a different device, but I think it would be easier to be able trust a live-cd that I am running.

About the older versions: my reasoning was that many cold storages use older versions because of them often being as insulated as possible.

[Abdussamad]

AFAIK tails has less than 3.2 so that's why you couldn't sign a transaction created by it with a 3.2.3 offline wallet.

In the OP you said you had 3.2.3 on your online system too. You shouldn't have said that if you weren't sure.

[Diaislief]

Sorry that was the situation before, where I couldn't get it to work. (neither with any other version for online)

So later I switched to using tails (or 3.0.1 on my normal Ubuntu install for testing)