For Electrum users. Stake your public key

[_act_]

Advice
Do not use the seed phrase or private key that produces the public key for having your coins. Use another seed phrase for your bitcoin. Use this just for staking.

If it is a seed phrase wallet, you will use of the public keys that your wallet seed phrase generated. If it is a single private key wallet, you will use the public key that your private key generated.

How to get you public key from Electrum
If you open Electrum, click on addresses. You will see your bitcoin address or lists of bitcoin address. Right click on any address among that you want to use its public key. You will see details, click on it. The Public key will start from 02, 03 or 04.

How does it work
You will send the public key to the person that you want to proof to that you are the owner of the public. The person will use the public key to encrypt a message and send you the. Only you that has the private key of the public key can decrypt the message. If you are able to decrypt the message, that means you are the owner of the the public key as you are bake to decrypt it with the private key that produces the public key.

What do you think about this?

[1714528103]

1714528103

[1714528103]

1714528103

[1714528103]

1714528103

[_act_]

Example

Alice and Bob wants to make a deal. Bob wants to make sure Alice is truly Alice and not any other person. Alice send Bob her wallet public key.

Bob went to Electrum and clicked on tools and clicked on encrypt/decrypt message:





Bob write his message, input Alice public key and clicked on encrypt to see the encryption like this example:

     



Bob will send Alice the encrypted that you see in the image above. Alice will go to her wallet, click on tools and encrypt/decrypt message. She will input her public key and the encrypted and click on decrypt to see the message just like you can see in the image below:

   

If Alice is able to decrypt the message, that means Bob wants make deal with the real Alice.

Other methods that can be used that is common on this forum is signing message with the bitcoin address that Alice has stated on this forum before. Another one is the use of PGP encrypted message.

[Mia Chloe]

This is quite a nice guide _act_ I myself have use PGP encryption a couple of times, thanks to guides similar to this on the forum. I really don't have a very strong technically knowledge on how the electrum encryption and decryption actually works. However I have  personally noticed that when it comes to things of this relation, people usually go for the option of using a Bitcoin signed message.
The only main question I have in mind is if someone that doesn't make use of electrum will be able to decrypt an encrypted message from an Electrum wallet following this guide. Because although Electrum is a very good open source wallet, there are a bunch of other nice ones too some people prefer to it. So is it in any way feasible?

[ranochigo]

No good reason why you should use this over PGP. PGP is specifically designed for secure encryption and decryption while this is just good enough, having PGP makes everything much more streamlined with its web of trust and the different features specific for such systems. PGP has more development and hardening as compared to this which uses ECIES and requires you to maintain a separate set of keys for encryption and decryption.

[pooya87]

The only main question I have in mind is if someone that doesn't make use of electrum will be able to decrypt an encrypted message from an Electrum wallet following this guide. Because although Electrum is a very good open source wallet, there are a bunch of other nice ones too some people prefer to it. So is it in any way feasible?

Other tools have to have implemented ECIES in the same way Electrum does to be able to decode the Base64 and decrypt the encrypted message. Considering that there is no universal standard in Bitcoin world for it and I haven't seen this option in any other wallets, I don't think it is feasible to use other tools, they'll have to only use Electrum.

[alastantiger]

Other methods that can be used that is common on this forum is signing message with the bitcoin address that Alice has stated on this forum before. Another one is the use of PGP encrypted message.

Isn't it such a coincidence that only yesterday, I learned about PGP and I used PGP with Kleopatra to send BitcoinGirl.Club an encrypted message. You can see it here - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5461523.msg63926930#msg63926930.

The procedure which you have described is exactly the same.

My observation is that this only works if you are going to encrypt and decrypt using the same software. One cannot use Electrum for encryption and use Kleopatra for decryption. It has to be carried out on the same software.

[_act_]

My observation is that this only works if you are going to encrypt and decrypt using the same software. One cannot use Electrum for encryption and use Kleopatra for decryption. It has to be carried out on the same software.

If it is the encryption and decryption that I explained on this forum, you will need Electrum to do it because Electrum is the only wallet that is having it. But if it is PGP key encryption and decryption, you can use Kleopatra or other PGP tools. You can use another tool for encryption and use Kleopatra for decryption or vice versa or use the same tool for both encryption and decryption. But I prefer to use offline tools for both. For using Electrum and Kleopatra, it is not possible because they are not the same type of encryption. Kleopatra is PGP while Electrum is ECIES

[ranochigo]

Other tools have to have implemented ECIES in the same way Electrum does to be able to decode the Base64 and decrypt the encrypted message. Considering that there is no universal standard in Bitcoin world for it and I haven't seen this option in any other wallets, I don't think it is feasible to use other tools, they'll have to only use Electrum.

Also have to caveat that you shouldn't be using any random tool for this since there's no standard for this. In fact, the original implementation by jackjack had flaws which was only corrected in Electrum after release. It was not suitable for production and cryptography goes beyond simply just implementing it. Between using a well established standard like PGP and an implementation by wallets, I'd prefer PGP.

Not saying that Electrum is bad, but it does help that PGP is more widely established and researched on rather than the implementations by single wallets.

[Yamane_Keto]

Although it is (currently) safe to post your public key, it is better not to do that, that is why we have Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash and not Public-Key, and for the same reason it is strongly recommended not to reuse addresses.

Therefore, instead of staking public key, we can use separate software, such as encrypting a message using Gpg4win or any of these programs https://www.openpgp.org/software/.

[ranochigo]

Although it is (currently) safe to post your public key, it is better not to do that, that is why we have Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash and not Public-Key, and for the same reason it is strongly recommended not to reuse addresses.

Therefore, instead of staking public key, we can use separate software, such as encrypting a message using Gpg4win or any of these programs https://www.openpgp.org/software/.

The security tradeoff, if implemented correctly wouldn't be worse than signing a message, or sending a transaction on the network. It isn't as much about the exposure of your public key since the security risk is still minimal but its more about the robustness of it.