watching-only version of existing wallet via text or stdio interface

[John Tate]

I have the electrum client installed on a headless system. I want to creating a watching only version of an existing wallet, as mentioned on the tutorials page. It seems this feature is only supported from the GUI. I am wondering how I can go about doing this from the text or stdio interface. This is so that I can use the client on a server to generate addresses by having a script communicate with it through stdio. I am a bit lost on how to achieve this but I really need it done.

Doing what the tutorial says doesn't work either when using the GUI. It simply exits are choosing to create a watching only version of an existing wallet.

[Abdussamad]

You can use libraries to generate addresses from a given master public key:

Electrum 1.9.8: https://github.com/prusnak/addrgen
Electrum 2.0: https://github.com/Bit-Wasp/bitcoin-lib-php  & https://github.com/vbuterin/pybitcointools

An example:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=900327.0

Otherwise if you want to use electrum directly it has a command line interface:

Code:

electrum getmpk #display master public key
electrum help getmpk #help on how get master public key
electrum help #all help

I don't quite understand what you mean about it exiting when you try to do a restore. It shouldn't exit. It probably hasn't been installed correctly.

[John Tate]

I installed it to the exact specifications on the website. I'm am thinking the issue might be related to Fedora's hobbled OpenSSL. So I am going to try it on Debian and see how it goes. Though everything else works.

Edit: Yes, this is an issue with Fedora 21's limited OpenSSL support. One would have to build their own OpenSSL, and compile python for it to use electrum on that distribution. It is working fine on Debian. There are issues with cryptocurrency in general on these operating systems.

[Abdussamad]

Not familiar with fedora 21 so I can't help you with that. What I can say is that, in case you haven't already done so, if you launch electrum from the console it will spit out error messages when it crashes and those error messages can help with the diagnoses.