Import private key work on electrum?

[MakeBelieve]

I used to use the official Bitcoin wallet which of course I knew how to use but I recently got suggested to use electrum because of it being much faster and easier to use. Can anyone tell me how I would go about importing my existing wallet.dat and private key into electrum?

[1715197420]

1715197420

[1715197420]

1715197420

[1715197420]

1715197420

[1715197420]

1715197420

[1715197420]

1715197420

[1715197420]

1715197420

[MakeBelieve]

I too want to know how to create a new electrum address and export the private key so I can see it in plain text? or is there some other way I can find out my private key? I'm going to be importing my existing wallet and then transferring it to a new electrum wallet.

[Abdussamad]

The easiest way to switch to using electrum is to send bitcoins from bitcoin-qt to an address in your electrum wallet's receive tab. Addresses under "main account" and "change" are deterministically generated using your electrum wallet seed so a one time backup of that seed is good for life. OTOH imported private keys are not covered by such a backup and you'd have to dump private keys in bitcoin-qt. So avoid all that and just send the bitcoins to an address in your electrum wallet.

Electrum has no option to create new addresses manually. They are created automatically as you start to use existing ones.

As for getting at an electrum address private key, you just right click on an address on the receive tab and select the relevant option. However electrum address private keys are a lot more sensitive than those of bitcoin-qt so I wouldn't advice it. See this post for more details about that:

Ok, now that we understand what's going on, how are we vulnerable?

First, what does the attacker need?

1. Your Master Public Key.
2. Any one of the private keys from an individual address derived from your Master Public(/private) Key.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=657205.0

[abercrombie]

I used to use the official Bitcoin wallet which of course I knew how to use but I recently got suggested to use electrum because of it being much faster and easier to use. Can anyone tell me how I would go about importing my existing wallet.dat and private key into electrum?

You can import the plain text private addresses into Electrum just pasting it into a form one line after the other, example:

5Z45l3k-Private-address-1-xlkseLkel
55Z5l3k-Private-address-2-zlkseLk3s
54S5l3k-Private-address-3-zlkseLk3s

As stated above, easiest way is to send coins from Bitcoin Core to the new Electrum addresses.  Reason being, you can restore your Electrum addresses from seed but that seed will not restore your imported addresses.  I just use the import feature when importing paper wallets, that I then send to another address.

[jbrnt]

You can export your private key in bitcoin core using the "dumpprivkey" command in the debug window. Google then instructions. Then when you have all the private keys you need, you can import them into electrum this way:

- Select "Wallet | Private Keys | Import" on the menu
- Enter password when prompted
- Read the warning and click "Yes"
- Copy and paste multiple private keys in the box and click "Import"
- Click "OK" on the success message
- Imported addresses are listed in "Imported" section under the "Received" tab
- Wait for Electrum to synchronise the transactions

If you intend to leave your coins in those address, remember to backup your bitcoin core private keys, because the electrum 12 word seed will NOT generate those bitcoin core addresses when you restore from seed in the future.