A question about my bitcoin balance

[BlackHatCoiner]

Let's say I have 1BTC and I delete my Electrum wallet but I have saved my public and private keys first.

If I download another wallet and insert my keys, will I still have my bitcoin?

I'm trying to figure out what confirms the ownership.

[Rath_]

If I download another wallet and insert my keys, will I still have my bitcoin?

Yes, your private keys prove the ownership of your funds. When you recover your wallet, a public key is derived from your private key so you don't have to save it. By the way, if you generate a wallet in Electrum, you are given a recovery phrase (12 words). It is much easier to backup than multiple keys which can be later derived from those words.

[jackg]

Your private keys control your bitcoin and only your private keys...

When you send funds, they're confirmed publicly on the blockchain. Only the private key is needed to sign funds and it can produce the public key and use that to search the blockchain for your address.

As bitcryptex alludes to, the 12 word phrase represents a master private key that can be imported into a wallet (in simple terms but other operations are done to turn it into a master private).

[BlackHatCoiner]

Ok thanks, I just want to earn some bitcoins, delete my Wallet, save my keys and then after some years spend them

[jackg]

Ok thanks, I just want to earn some bitcoins, delete my Wallet, save my keys and then after some years spend them

Write down the seed, keep it somewhere secure and don't forget you left it there or what it's for!

You might want to put it in a drawer or your wallet and have a few additional copies.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Ok thanks, I just want to earn some bitcoins, delete my Wallet, save my keys and then after some years spend them

Write down the seed, keep it somewhere secure and don't forget you left it there or what it's for!

You might want to put it in a drawer or your wallet and have a few additional copies.

Why the seed? Isn't the seed just something related with Electrum?

[jackg]

Ok thanks, I just want to earn some bitcoins, delete my Wallet, save my keys and then after some years spend them

Write down the seed, keep it somewhere secure and don't forget you left it there or what it's for!

You might want to put it in a drawer or your wallet and have a few additional copies.

Why the seed? Isn't the seed just something related with Electrum?

Don't try writing down a private key, that will probably cause problems later on.

You're better off generating a seed mnemonic, either in electrum or a BIP39 compliant piece of software.

[Husna QA]

I am just adding a little information. To my knowledge, for reasons of 'safety standards,' the seed produced by Electrum can only be used in Electrum, and the seed is different from BIP39 seeds in general.

-snip-

You can try checking the electrum seed at https://iancoleman.io/bip39/ then the results will be invalid.
However, when creating a new wallet, you can choose the BIP39 seed option to import seed from other wallets that using the BIP39 algorithm (such as Mycelium, Ledger, etc.)

So as long as you have a seed or private key from Electrum, then you can still access your Bitcoin even though from Electrum Wallet on other devices.

[BitMaxz]

Why the seed? Isn't the seed just something related with Electrum?

The private key is also a good backup if you know the paired public key or bitcoin address.
Make some test first to make sure that the private key you have is exactly is your public key/bitcoin address you use from your old wallet.


So that you won't get any problem to receive your earn bitcoins.

The seed is the whole back up of the wallet generated from Electrum. So if you have this backup seed phrase all of your public/private key are stored on this backup that anytime you can use to recover your wallet to Electrum or any wallet that support this seed.

The reason why they want it you to backup the seed phrase it's because you might not still don't understand how Electrum works and you might get mistake/problem sending or receiving in the future.

I suggest you backup them both if you want only a single wallet(Single bitcoin address) you can backup the one single private key but still backup the seed phrase for the future recovery once you forgot the private.

(Private key) treat it as your important file and (Seed phrase) treat it as very important file both of them must be always in private.

[odolvlobo]

Ok thanks, I just want to earn some bitcoins, delete my Wallet, save my keys and then after some years spend them

Write down the seed, keep it somewhere secure and don't forget you left it there or what it's for!

Why the seed? Isn't the seed just something related with Electrum?

The bitcoins held in your wallet may be stored in many addresses. All of those addresses come from the seed, so rather than tracking down all of the addresses and and their keys, it is safer and easier to save the seed instead.

You might want to put it in a drawer or your wallet and have a few additional copies.

Don't keep the seed with you. You are likely to lose it or someone might find it. Store it somewhere very safe, like in a safe.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Okay thank you guys. Now about where I will keep it, I'm thinking on a strongly password-protected rar. They can't open these things. Of course I'm not gonna name it "HEY HERE IS MY PRIVATE KEY BUT YOU CANT TAKE IT BECAUSE ITS LOCKED.rar", something that doesn't pay attention.

[nc50lc]

As much as possible, select AES-256 encryption for you encrypted rar, save it offline in a flash-drive and have a (physical) written copy.
If you want to save it online for personal reasons, choose your storage wisely, but it's not recommended.

[pooya87]

Okay thank you guys. Now about where I will keep it, I'm thinking on a strongly password-protected rar. They can't open these things. Of course I'm not gonna name it "HEY HERE IS MY PRIVATE KEY BUT YOU CANT TAKE IT BECAUSE ITS LOCKED.rar", something that doesn't pay attention.

it also depends on what kind of application you are going to use to compress the file too. there are a lot of compressing programs out there and not all are good. look for an open source project that is popular and has been reviewed so that it doesn't have any kind of unknown bugs in it. also try to test whatever you create in the end to make sure if you can also decrypt it.

P.S. i'll still suggest a physical backup such as a paper wallet though.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Okay thank you guys. Now about where I will keep it, I'm thinking on a strongly password-protected rar. They can't open these things. Of course I'm not gonna name it "HEY HERE IS MY PRIVATE KEY BUT YOU CANT TAKE IT BECAUSE ITS LOCKED.rar", something that doesn't pay attention.

it also depends on what kind of application you are going to use to compress the file too. there are a lot of compressing programs out there and not all are good. look for an open source project that is popular and has been reviewed so that it doesn't have any kind of unknown bugs in it. also try to test whatever you create in the end to make sure if you can also decrypt it.

P.S. i'll still suggest a physical backup such as a paper wallet though.

WinRar latest version. And I may encrypt it twice. Like a rar inside another rar.

Physical?? I don't find it smart. What if I somehow lose the paper? There are dozens of ways. From kids until maid.

[pooya87]

Physical?? I don't find it smart. What if I somehow lose the paper? There are dozens of ways. From kids until maid.

there are lots more ways that you can lose a digital backup, hardware failure being the most common reason. just last year i lost my hard disk to bad sectors now if i didn't have any backups a lot of my documents would have been lost.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Physical?? I don't find it smart. What if I somehow lose the paper? There are dozens of ways. From kids until maid.

there are lots more ways that you can lose a digital backup, hardware failure being the most common reason. just last year i lost my hard disk to bad sectors now if i didn't have any backups a lot of my documents would have been lost.

I'm thinking on uploading my rar on some google drives and mega accounts. Can't be lost then. And if course save it on hardware too.

[NotATether]

I am just adding a little information. To my knowledge, for reasons of 'safety standards,' the seed produced by Electrum can only be used in Electrum, and the seed is different from BIP39 seeds in general.

-snip-

What makes it unsafe for Electrum to generate seed phrases itself? Does it have something to do with not being able to clear the memory they were stored in?

[o_e_l_e_o]

I'm thinking on uploading my rar on some google drives and mega accounts. Can't be lost then. And if course save it on hardware too.

Using cloud storage is not a good idea. Once you've uploaded something to the cloud, you can never delete it. You have no idea how many servers around the world it will be stored on, and who will have access to those servers. You say you want to wait "some years" before spending your bitcoin. There is no way you can be absolutely sure that in the coming years there isn't some critical flaw exposed in the RAR program you used, or the algorithm it used, or the cloud storage provider's security, and so on. It's much safer to write it down or engrave it in metal and store it offline.

What makes it unsafe for Electrum to generate seed phrases itself?

It's not "unsafe" per se, it's just that Electrum seed phrases don't use the BIP39 standard and therefore aren't compatible with other wallets. You can read here for the reasons why: https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/seedphrase.html?highlight=bip39#motivation

[MrFreeDragon]

-snip-
I'm trying to figure out what confirms the ownership.

Just the private key will be enough. You actually do not need to safe the public key, as it is created from prvate key in one possible way.

The private key is the number from 1 to 2^256, so in binary it is 256 '0' and '1' digits, or in hex it is 64 symbols from 0-9 A-F. Electrum usually shows this number in WIF format (base58 encoded number with bitcoin version), however it is still the number.

So, saving the private key will be enough to have the access to your bitcoin wallet. Save it secure and keep calm.

PS. If you used HD wallet in your Electrum, so proably your BTC could be not on one address, but on several ones. In this case, collect them on one address and save the private key from that one address. Or as was said above, save the seed (the seed gives the access to all your wallets in HD wallet).

[Husna QA]

-snip-

What makes it unsafe for Electrum to generate seed phrases itself? Does it have something to do with not being able to clear the memory they were stored in?

BIP39 has several weaknesses that are almost similar to the seed phrase model that Electrum used before version 2.0, in this case, about using bidirectional encoding between seed phrases and entropy.
Electrum can still import BIP39 seeds, as I have mentioned before.
However, the developer does not recommend it for several reasons, as the link o_e_l_e_o has shown.