question about electrum

[yaya1]

Hello all,

 I understood that Electrum is free, but:
 
 1. What operations do cost money in it?

 2. Does the Two Factor Authentication costs money?
    If yes how much? and how do I pay for it?

Thanks a lot!

 

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[NeuroticFish]

1. What operations do cost money in it?

Basically sending out transactions is the one that costs money, but it's not something you pay to Electrum, you pay it to the network/miners.
And yes, 2FA.

2. Does the Two Factor Authentication costs money?
    If yes how much? and how do I pay for it?

Yes, 2FA costs money, it's a 3rd party service (Trusted Coin). The extra money is sent together with the transactions and you'll pay either for 20 tx, either for 100 tx, upfront, in the first tx from the new (let's say) batch.
This could help with more info: https://trustedcoin.com/#/faq

Batch size   Per transaction price   Batch price
Pay every 20 transactions:   0.000025 BTC/tx   0.0005 BTC total
Pay every 100 transactions:   0.0000125 BTC/tx   0.00125 BTC total

--
I will add that imho the added security doesn't worth the cost and if you do have bigger/big funds you want to protect you may want to acquire a hardware wallet or, if you have the background/knowledge, set up a cold storage (and make sure it never goes online).

[nc50lc]

1. What operations do cost money in it?

Aside from the above;
If you're using lightning, using "swap" or "reverse swap" costs an additional fee on top of the on-chain transaction fee to pay for Boltz's service.

[Abdussamad]

2fa fees are for outgoing transactions i.e. spending money not for receiving money.

[BitMaxz]

When you are using 2fa it will cost an extra fee which is different on the wallet without 2FA. It should notify you on the first wallet creation.

"A small fee will be charged on each transaction that uses the remote server. You may check and modify your billing preferences once the installation is complete."

And Electrum 2FA uses 3rd party service called trustedcoin.
You can read their TOS here https://api.trustedcoin.com/2/tos?billing_plan=electrum-per-tx-otp

About the fee cost I don't know exactly but check this quoted below.

the fee is only for sending bitcoin. you can click on the little shield icon in the bottom right to see the fee schedule. for example if you choose to prepay for 20 transactions you will be charged 0.000025*20=0.0005 btc the first time you spend bitcoin and nothing for the next 19 transactions.

you are only asked the 2fa code when spending bitcoin. electrum won't know or care if the destination wallet is a hardware wallet, software wallet, website or what have you.

[NotATether]

Regarding 2fa using TrustedCoin:

Wouldn't it be trivial to implement a free, open-source alternative to it, given that it seems to only create 2FA codes? There are a number of open standards for doing this like TOTP, so it would be most logical to make use of some decentralized 2fa server (if one exists), and, provided that it is distributed among enough clients, it can be integrated as a second 2FA option into electrum.

Authentication would be done internally using public/private keypairs, but with emails and passwords as an abstraction to identify and unlock each pair respetively. It would operate similar to the Matrix protocol for messaging, for instance (it is open and thus has a number of different open-source clients for it).

Maybe I should make a seperate thread for this, but only if there is enough interest about this topic.

[Abdussamad]

TOTP code checking can't be decentralized since you need to store the shared secret and the more servers have that the greater the risk of it being compromised. You can instead create a 2fa wallet of your own using multisig between two or more devices.

[hugeblack]

According to ThomasV, they do not accept any form of donations, and the argument is that whoever accepts money is not interested in future development.

Thank you for your support. I usually do not request donations for myself, because I do not think it is an effective way to incentivise free software.
Developers who request bounties tend to finish projects quickly, and do not really care about long-term maintenance.
However, you you can donate to the people who run public Electrum servers.

In general, the use of the wallet is free (it is open source,) but it is not free because whoever operates Electrum servers can sell your data, so you may need some costs to run your own server.