Thank you for that question .1. What are your future plans for Electrum?
Well, developing user interfaces is difficult.2. Compared to (for example) Copay, Electrum feels a little bit (too) geeky. Do you plan to add a "average joe" mode some day ?
As we all know, Bitcoin currently does not scale well.3. What part of the bitcoin development is the most exciting one ?
I believe Hardware wallets are great; Electrum supports all major hardware wallets (Trezor, Ledger, Keepkey)4. Please share you opinion about Hardware Wallets.
I guess what you mean is deterministic wallets. HD simply means "hierarchical deterministic", but few wallets use the hierarchical aspect of it.Did electrum invent HD Wallets? It was the first HD Wallet I know.
These issues are well known.Can you comment on some of the security / privacy problems with HD wallets?
Newer version are actually faster. However, if your wallet is old, it may contain a lot of addresses, which slows down the synchronization. If that is the case, I suggest to create a new wallet every year or so.I have the feeling the newer versions of electrum are a bit slower than the older. But maybe it relates to the daily micro-transactions from cloud-mining. What do you think?
The most popular Electrum plugin is probably the LabelSync plugin. Plugins used to be simpler in the past. I am planning to modify the plugin architecture, in order to handle various GUIs. I hope that this will also make them easier to write.Electrum has a infrastructure for plugins, but I heard it is very complicated. Are there plans to make it easier for developers? And what plugin do you think is the best?
Not for the moment. My understanding is that this might be considered as money laundering in some regulations, and that promoting this could jeopardize the entire project. I might change my position if there is some clarification of the legal situation.Do you have plans to integrate some privacy-enhancing features like coinshuffle?
The number of Electrum servers has been increasing recently, because the code has become more efficient and easier to run.Ist the number of electrum-servers also decreasing like bitcoin-clients? Are there some incentives for people to run an electrum server?
This is a very complicated issue, and I do not have a clear opinion on that. I understand the arguments of both sides, and they are both reasonable. However, I find it unfortunate that this debate has turned into a personal dispute for some people.Can you can tell us your thoughts around the block size debate? This has been one of the biggest topics in bitcoin for quite some time now.
With the latest version, you can restore a wallet from the command line by passing a list of private keys, using the 'restore' command.I have a project which uses Electrum to receive bitcoins by importing private keys. It's currently a bit awkward to get it set up because you have to open the gui, close the gui, paste into a wallet file and so on. You can see the gruesome details here.
So my question is: Do you have any plans to further develop the command line interface?
It would be ideal for me to have a text-only way to configure everything and get it running (e.g. inside docker).
The current version of Electrum for Android uses a set of bindings provided by Google, that is not maintained anymore by Google, and is not user friendly. In addition, it is difficult to create an apk from it, so I never published it on Google Play.Why are there not Electrum apps on Google Play for Android and on the App Store for iOS?
Is this because you are concerned that those binaries could be altered without your knowledge? Or is it more of a time/cost to develop problem?
answered above.hi!
what is your opinion regarding the blocksize issue(BIP101/BIP100)?
For iOS: yes, definitely (see above).Will you maybe make a electrum app for iOS in the future(for both Bitcoin and Litecoin)?
I have been contacted by Coinapult.HI Thomas Thanks for coming on to do this AMA.
Some time ago, Coinapult released their own Electrum client, with a plugin for their Locks service: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZZWSZwONaM
Has Electrum considered adding the Locks plugin to the official Electrum client?
I want to get your opinion on this:
Why can smartphone be a hardware wallet? I know the security risk involving network connections such as wifi and cellular data. But what if we disable both, and only allow the phone communicating with a client phone via other methods; such as: audio, QR codes, bluetooth. If it's possible, it could be huge since smartphones nowadays are cheap and easy to get one anywhere in the world.
If you disable both is it still a smartphone? And if you turn those back on ever, you have opened a window for all of your previously private data to be copied from the device.I want to get your opinion on this:
Why can smartphone be a hardware wallet? I know the security risk involving network connections such as wifi and cellular data. But what if we disable both, and only allow the phone communicating with a client phone via other methods; such as: audio, QR codes, bluetooth. If it's possible, it could be huge since smartphones nowadays are cheap and easy to get one anywhere in the world.
Some servers are hardcoded.1. How does Electrum wallet learn the server list? I know servers are peer to peer advertised via IRC, but how exactly does the process work? How does a server make itself known and make its way into the server list of a wallet? Is there something like a hardcoded list which is never updated?
Each new transaction creates a new address. There is no limit in the client, but most servers put a limit on the number of addresses that a client can request, in order to prevent DOS attacks (the default limit is 10000 addresses). Another practical limit is that your client will become slow if it has too many addresses. If you do a lot of transactions, it might be a good idea to archive your wallet and create a new one, every couple of years.2. Your GUI is amazing. How long can I keep a single Electrum wallet (a single seed)? Is there a limit on the maximum number of transactions I can have historically? Can I use the same electrum wallet for my entire life?
that's correct. we prune spent inputs. UTXOs cannot be pruned, obviously.3. The servers have limits. Does refer to spent tx per address, right? The utxo set of an address will never be pruned, even it exceeds the server's limit (e.g. 10.005 utxos for a single address).
Not for the moment. This might be the case in a future version, but only if we can make sure that the user has never been exposed to addresses.4. Does Electrum ever removes an address? Like the fist address generated by electrum, will it be removed after much time goes by and I generate 10.000 new addresses after it?
yes, see here: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/15195. Do you plan to add support for multisig? not the multisig already supported which is electrum-to-electrum, multisig with other non-electrum wallets (simple pubkeys which cannot be computed deterministically).
You can, go to Wallet > Private Keys > SweepWhy can't I import a private key into an existing Electrum wallet?
Did you check that it was the same addresses or same balances? I can't imagine how that would be possible you need to either import a private key, or use a wallet file generated by electrum. By default, for me, it opens with the wallet and requires authentication for sending transactions.I am new to Electrum Wallet, but I have it downloaded on a Linux laptop. Today I tried to download it onto a Mac using a different VPN IP address, proxy and Tor browser, but it still knew instantly who I was and appeared just as it does on my laptop, open and without the need for a password or anything, which freaked me a bit.
Can you tell me how it could do that?
Not with the current latest version of electrum. If you really wanted to prevent someone with access to your wallet file to be able to open your wallet then you could GPG encrypt your wallet file, then decrypt it prior to opening electrum, then reencrypt it once you close electrum (and be sure to dispose of the previous decrypted file).Hi Thomas,
Simple question. Is there a way for me to force electrum [linux] to require password on startup rather than just for signing transactions. I suppose they are simply public addresses but it seems like an anonymity issue, allowing anyone on the machine to see addresses.
Thanks for such a great piece of software
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