electrum fork

[chainofzee]

hello,

what could go wrong while electrum forking?
could funds get lost or unavailable for a while?

[Rath_]

what could go wrong while electrum forking?
could funds get lost or unavailable for a while?

Electrum is an open-source software which can be forked, meaning that there can be another version of it maintained by a different person or a group of people with different features. You are probably referring to a blockchain fork. In case of a planned hard fork, the software should be updated (or not) depending on which side you are going to stick with. Softforks do not affect existing clients in general. You shouldn't be really worried about it since hard forks do not happen often (except for altcoins which want to gain popularity by airdropping coins).

As for the accidental forks when two miners mine a block at the same time, the node you are connected to will follow the longer chain. Even if your transaction is included in an orphaned chain, it should be still in the mempool of the longest chain or be confirmed at the same time. Your funds won't get lost in such case.

[HCP]

what could go wrong while electrum forking?

What exactly do you mean by "electrum forking"?

Are you referring to creating a "forked" version of the Electrum source code to create a customised version of the software... or are you talking about blockchain "forks"?

[Last of the V8s]

Or is every 'upgrade' of a wallet or other software a fork?

[chainofzee]

what could go wrong while electrum forking?
could funds get lost or unavailable for a while?

Electrum is an open-source software which can be forked, meaning that there can be another version of it maintained by a different person or a group of people with different features. You are probably referring to a blockchain fork. In case of a planned hard fork, the software should be updated (or not) depending on which side you are going to stick with. Softforks do not affect existing clients in general. You shouldn't be really worried about it since hard forks do not happen often (except for altcoins which want to gain popularity by airdropping coins).

As for the accidental forks when two miners mine a block at the same time, the node you are connected to will follow the longer chain. Even if your transaction is included in an orphaned chain, it should be still in the mempool of the longest chain or be confirmed at the same time. Your funds won't get lost in such case.

Thanks

James lopp believes it could cause a problem:
https://twitter.com/lopp/status/1266045409836883973
I was wondering what are the possible scenarios.

and also the word "fork" is being used in so many different ways. in this case the current one is gonna be BSV wallet right? and another project is gonna get forked for btc. Am I correct?

and do we call an upgrade a (soft) fork?

[chainofzee]

Electrum is an open-source software wallet. Forking the software wallet code has no effect on the Bitcoin network nor on your funds because they are 'stored' on a blockchain database (on a decentralized p2p network) and not in the wallet.

Thank u,

but since the electrum wallet's not using BIP39, if anything happens i wouldnt be able to access my wallet anywhr else. So, even if it's on blockchain, my funds wouldnt be available at least for a while.

[Rath_]

and also the word "fork" is being used in so many different ways. in this case the current one is gonna be BSV wallet right? and another project is gonna get forked for btc. Am I correct?

Oh, you are referring to quite an interesting event which happened a few days go. The main developer of ElectrumX, which is the most popular implemantation of Electrum Server, decided to support BSV blockchain from now on. Electrum developers have forked his project and are now going to continue updating it for Bitcoin blockchain. There is nothing to be afraid of. Server operators will have to update their nodes from that repository from this day forward.

and do we call an upgrade a (soft) fork?

This answer should be sufficient.

but since the electrum wallet's not using BIP39, if anything happens i wouldnt be able to access my wallet anywhr else. So, even if it's on blockchain, my funds wouldnt be available at least for a while.

You can always export private keys for individual address in Electrum and import them to any wallet which allows to do so.

[FatFork]

but since the electrum wallet's not using BIP39, if anything happens i wouldnt be able to access my wallet anywhr else. So, even if it's on blockchain, my funds wouldnt be available at least for a while.

I believe there are ways to convert electrum seed to BIP39 format and there are also wallets that support direct import of electrum seeds.
But, as BitCryptex said, you can always export private keys and import them into any other wallet.

[HCP]

but since the electrum wallet's not using BIP39, if anything happens i wouldnt be able to access my wallet anywhr else. So, even if it's on blockchain, my funds wouldnt be available at least for a while.

There is a "fork" () of iancoleman's BIP39 tool that will take an Electrum seed and provide the private keys... https://github.com/FarCanary/ElectrumSeedTester (original Bitcointalk thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5121443.0) or you can export private keys from within Electrum itself.

James lopp believes it could cause a problem:
https://twitter.com/lopp/status/1266045409836883973
I was wondering what are the possible scenarios.

Right, so the lead developer of the most common Electrum server has decided that ElectrumX will be BSV from now on... just to be clear... that is not Electrum that is moving to a different blockchain, it is the server software that is doing so.

There are two components to the Electrum ecosphere... The client software Electrum that runs on a users PC/phone... and then there is the server software which the clients connect to. ElectrumX is but one version of the server software (albeit the most popular)... there are others... and indeed I'd be very surprised if some developers don't fork Electrum[i[X[/i] and continue to release a BTC version going forward.


TLDR; ElectrumX server dev has decided to back the BSV pony in the "True Bitcoin" race... This might cause some issues for people who maintain/run Electrum servers, but as a user, your BTC in Electrum wallets will be safe and you will most likely be able to access them without any issues.

[Rath_]

I believe there are ways to convert electrum seed to BIP39 format and there are also wallets that support direct import of electrum seeds.

Are you sure about that? I haven't seen any such wallets and making such a converter would be extremely difficult if not completely impossible because I think you would have to literally generate X amount of BIP39 seeds to find the one corresponding to your Master Private Key.

[HCP]

Are you sure about that? I haven't seen any such wallets and making such a converter would be extremely difficult if not completely impossible because I think you would have to literally generate X amount of BIP39 seeds to find the one corresponding to your Master Private Key.

It would be easy enough to change the mnemonic to generate the same seed value (ie. the very large number)... but because the passphrases used by both systems are fundamentally different, you'd never get the same addresses.

This is because BIP39 wallets use a passphrase of ["mnemonic" + WHATEVER_THE_USER_TYPES]... whereas Electrum uses a passphrase of ["electrum" + WHATEVER_THE_USER_TYPES]

So, in BIP39 wallet, if you don't use a passphrase... the wallet itself will still use the fixed string "mnemonic" as your passphrase, whereas Electrum will have used the fixed string "electrum"... different passphrase == different addresses.

And if you try and use a custom passphrase, for instance, "myPa$$phr4s3"... then BIP39 wallet actually uses "mnemonicmyPa$$phr4s3" and Electrum would use "electrummyPa$$phr4s3"... again, different passphrase == different addresses.

[FatFork]

I believe there are ways to convert electrum seed to BIP39 format and there are also wallets that support direct import of electrum seeds.

Are you sure about that? I haven't seen any such wallets and making such a converter would be extremely difficult if not completely impossible because I think you would have to literally generate X amount of BIP39 seeds to find the one corresponding to your Master Private Key.

Yeah, I guess I was wrong about that.
I was sure I had read it somewhere... but unfortunately, there is no way to convert an electrum seed phrase to BIP39.

[nc50lc]

Good thing is spesmilo (/spesmilo/electrumx) has forked kyuupichan's electrumx (/kyuupichan/electrumx) and actively maintained.
There shouldn't be any compatibility issues with the previous version of electrumx prior to BSV exclusive update.

could funds get lost or unavailable for a while?

Funds are in the Bitcoin Blockchain, there's no way to lose them aside from the ways of losing your private keys.

Electrum servers who prefer Bitcoin over BSV can move to the fork maintained by the same developer as Electrum, or don't upgrade for now.
As an end-user who uses the client, you'll never notice the difference unless all of the servers updated to the "BSV version".

[pooya87]

there are still other implementation of Electrum nodes that clients can connect to even if ElectrumX implementation stopped being developed and used some day. your Electrum client is also capable of knowing which network it is connected to and keep remaining on bitcoin network even if a malicious altcoin node tried giving you irrelevant data.

[Abdussamad]

The server software forked not the client. You don't have to migrate to different wallet software. This is a problem for server operators not users like us.