Doubts on Tails & Electrum Setup

[canudinho]

Hello everyone,
Hope everything is fine by your side

Please some help:

-> After having some hardware wallets, I decided not trusting on the person behind it, once Trezor or Ledger (uh, this one especially) have been commenting sh#t about the privacy, thus the risks involving a 3rd party on the safety of my coins;

-> I've reached Tails & Electrum SETUP, studied about it, implemented, tested, liked;

-> I would like to know why especifically this setup is not reliable, as I've seen some posts about it, cause for me is a great one... but i will appreciate your comments on the problems of it

-> There is also 1 especial point that I am confuse yet: Some people say they faced problems trying to recover the coins from a really old electrum wallet... why is that? what do I have to do for not having this problem in 10 years from now?


Best regards

[DaveF]

...
-> There is also 1 especial point that I am confuse yet: Some people say they faced problems trying to recover the coins from a really old electrum wallet... why is that? what do I have to do for not having this problem in 10 years from now?

Usually they tried to do something creative in terms of generating the wallet and didn't realize that they were making something non standard that would not work later.

If you just created a wallet with electrum, backed up your seed safely, made sure the seed works you will be fine.

If you try to do something 'your way' and forget exactly how you did it 10 years from now, you might not be able to get access to your wallet.

-Dave

[philipma1957]

...
-> There is also 1 especial point that I am confuse yet: Some people say they faced problems trying to recover the coins from a really old electrum wallet... why is that? what do I have to do for not having this problem in 10 years from now?

Usually they tried to do something creative in terms of generating the wallet and didn't realize that they were making something non standard that would not work later.

If you just created a wallet with electrum, backed up your seed safely, made sure the seed works you will be fine.

If you try to do something 'your way' and forget exactly how you did it 10 years from now, you might not be able to get access to your wallet.

-Dave

yeah.

op  have like 0.000011 btc in your wallet.

generate your seed offline. make a few copies of the seed.


shut the pc down.

test if you can recover with the seed.

if you can recover  shut the pc down.

make sure no seed copies are online.  that wallet should be safe for you.

[MusaMohamed]

-> I've reached Tails & Electrum SETUP, studied about it, implemented, tested, liked;

How to Install Tails OS on USB flash drive for Wallet Purpose

-> There is also 1 especial point that I am confuse yet: Some people say they faced problems trying to recover the coins from a really old electrum wallet... why is that? what do I have to do for not having this problem in 10 years from now?

I hope I understood your question. It depends on what Electrum wallet uses to create seed phrase. In the past it supported BIP32 but after version 2.0, it changes to Electrum Seed Version System.

Electrum wallet seed phrase
bip32 wallet structure for electrum

You can use third party tool like https://iancoleman.io/bip39/ to convert mnemonic code.

[nc50lc]

-> I would like to know why especifically this setup is not reliable, as I've seen some posts about it, cause for me is a great one... but i will appreciate your comments on the problems of it

I rarely see comments about unreliability of Electrum on Tails,
Perhaps it's those who are getting issues with wallet updates which can easily be circumvented by using the Electrum Appimage binary.
That was when it's essential to update because of the malicious server message exploit in the older versions; and the incompatibility with exported transactions after the implementation of PSBT. (for those who are using cold-storage set-up)

Those mentioned are not an issue with the current bundled Electrum in the latest release.

-> There is also 1 especial point that I am confuse yet: Some people say they faced problems trying to recover the coins from a really old electrum wallet... why is that? what do I have to do for not having this problem in 10 years from now?

Those was the wallets before a critical bug in the wallet's key derivation function.
The fix made those very old seed incompatible with the later versions, it'll work but will derive a different set of keys.
But that was, as you said "really old", in v0.31 (Dec 6, 2011) and another upgrade in v0.34 almost on its early stage.

In the mature versions or even after 0.34, all seed phrases have been compatible with the latest versions.
I don't expect any incompatibility patches with the seed unless there's actually a critical bug with the current Electrum seed.

[Findingnemo]

Some people say they faced problems trying to recover the coins from a really old electrum wallet... why is that? what do I have to do for not having this problem in 10 years from now?

I doubt that you read it properly, it's mostly Bitcoin Core, not Electrum where people get issues when they try to recover BTC from very old wallet files, and its mostly due to the incompatability of their files or they messed up with their back up or missing part of it, or wrong seeds or even bought wallet.dat file from someone with the hope of getting BTC from it.

The electrum wallet file is not actually wallet.dat file which can that we seen from qt is also another cause of the confusion with most of'em.

[Tutorial] How to make a cold storage Bitcoin wallet with TailsOS and USB Flash

[LoyceV]

-> I've reached Tails & Electrum SETUP, studied about it, implemented, tested, liked;

Tails is great for privacy, but it's still a hot wallet. Hardware wallets are (in general) safer, unless you never go online with your Tails Electrum that holds your seed phrase. You can use a separate version of Tails that goes online, and has a watch-only wallet. But that's much more work.
So before doing this, you should decide what you want: Privacy? Safety? Both? Or a combination of both, depending on how much is in each wallet (a small hot wallet is convenient, a large cold wallet is safe).

[o_e_l_e_o]

-> I would like to know why especifically this setup is not reliable, as I've seen some posts about it, cause for me is a great one... but i will appreciate your comments on the problems of it

It's a good set up, but there are some things to be aware of.

As Loyce points out, this isn't necessarily a cold wallet unless you make it so by running it on a permanently airgapped machine. A temporarily disconnected machine is a distant second. Ideally you would run this on a permanently airgapped machine, paired with a watch-only Electrum wallet on your main computer.

Secondly, be aware that Tails has no persistent storage unless you configure it as such. With no persistent storage you are completely reliant on your back up to access your coins. Make at least two, and store them separately.

And lastly, the version of Electrum which is bundled with Tails is not frequently updated. Tails is currently bundled with Electrum 4.0.2. If you want to use the most recent version for any reason, you'll need to download and verify the standalone appimage.

[canudinho]

I hope I understood your question. It depends on what Electrum wallet uses to create seed phrase. In the past it supported BIP32 but after version 2.0, it changes to Electrum Seed Version System.
Electrum wallet seed phrase
bip32 wallet structure for electrum

Really useful, thank you Sr