A Beginner's Guide to the Electrum Bitcoin Wallet

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Startup times are instant because it operates in conjunction with high-performance servers that handle the most complicated parts of the Bitcoin system. Not really; the Electrum client never sends private keys to the servers. In addition, it verifies the information reported by servers, using a technique called Simple Payment Verification. Your wallet can be entirely recovered from its seed.

The seed phrase created by Electrum has bits transaction fee per kb electrum entropy. This means that it provides the same level of security as a Bitcoin private key of length bits. It is not possible to recover your password. However, you can restore your wallet from its seed phrase and choose a new password. If you lose both your password and your seed, there is no way to recover your money.

This is why we transaction fee per kb electrum you to save your seed phrase on paper. In general, the speed of confirmation depends on the fee you attach to your transaction; miners prioritize transactions that pay the highest fees. This feature is enabled by default in recent versions of Electrum.

When you freeze an address, the funds in that address will not be used for sending bitcoins. Wallet file encryption is activated by default since version 2. It is intended to protect your privacy, but also to prevent transaction fee per kb electrum from requesting bitcoins on a wallet that you do not control.

Yes, see Cold Storage. You should sweep them instead. If you want to import private keys and not sweep them, you need to create a special wallet that does not have a seed.

Sweeping private keys means to send all the bitcoins they control to an existing address in your wallet. The private keys you sweep do not become a part of your wallet. Instead, all the bitcoins they control are sent to an address that has been deterministically generated from your wallet seed. Enter the private keys in the appropriate field. That is the destination address and it will be from your existing electrum wallet. You can transaction fee per kb electrum a transaction with several outputs.

In the GUI, type each address and amount on a line, separated by a comma. This might happen if you are trying to spend a large number of transaction outputs for example, if you have collected hundreds of donations from a Bitcoin faucet. When you send Bitcoins, Electrum looks for unspent coins that are in your wallet in order to create a new transaction. Unspent coins can have different values, much like physical coins and bills. If this happens, you should consolidate your transaction inputs by sending smaller amounts of bitcoins to one of your wallet addresses; this would be the equivalent of exchanging a stack of nickels for a dollar bill.

The transaction fee per kb electrum limit is the maximum number of consecutive unused addresses in your deterministic sequence of addresses. Electrum uses it in order to stop looking for addresses. Electrum will generate new addresses as you use them, until it hits the gap limit.

If you need to pre-generate more addresses, you can do so by typing wallet. This command will generate one new address. Note that the address will be shown with a red background in the address tab to indicate that it is beyond the gap limit. The red color will remain until the gap is filled. Addresses beyond the gap limit will not automatically be recovered from the seed.

For example, if you wanted to generate 50 addresses, you could do this:. To upgrade Electrum, just install the most recent version.

The way to do this will depend on your OS. Note that your wallet files are stored separately from the software, so you can safely remove the old version of the software if your OS does not do it for you. For this reason, it is not recommended to downgrade Electrum transaction fee per kb electrum an older version once you have opened your wallet file with the new version. The older version will not always be able to read the new wallet file. Frequently Asked Questions How does Electrum work?

Does Electrum trust servers? What is the seed? How secure is the seed? I have forgotten my password. What can I do? My transaction has been unconfirmed for a long time. How is the wallet encrypted? Does Electrum support cold wallets? Can I import private keys from other Bitcoin clients? Can I sweep private keys from other Bitcoin clients? Where is my wallet file located?

Can I do bulk payments with Electrum? Can Electrum create and sign raw transactions? Electrum freezes when I try to send bitcoins. What is the gap limit? How can I pre-generate new addresses? How do I upgrade Electrum? If you have made a transaction that is unconfirmed, you can: Wait for a transaction fee per kb electrum time. Eventually, your transaction will either be confirmed or cancelled.

This might take several days. Increase the transaction fee. A window will popup with the unsigned transaction. A CPFP is a new transaction that pays a high fee in order to compensate for the small fee of its parent transaction. It can transaction fee per kb electrum done by the recipient of the funds, or by the sender, if the transaction has a change output.

The private keys are decrypted only briefly, when you need to transaction fee per kb electrum a transaction; for this you need to enter your password. In addition, your wallet file may be encrypted on disk. Note that the wallet information will remain unencrypted in the memory of your computer for the duration of your session.

If transaction fee per kb electrum wallet is encrypted, then its password will be required in order to open it. Note that the password will not be kept in memory; Electrum does not need it in order to save the wallet on disk, because it uses asymmetric encryption ECIES.

You will need to back up this wallet, transaction fee per kb electrum it cannot be recovered from a seed. Amounts are in the current unit set in the client.

The total is shown in the GUI. For example, if you wanted to generate 50 addresses, you could transaction fee per kb electrum this: Some Electrum upgrades will modify the format of your wallet files.

The following issues should be considered when upgrading Electrum 1. Please allow it time to complete, and expect it to take a little longer than usual for Electrum to be ready. The contents transaction fee per kb electrum your wallet file will be replaced with an Electrum 2 wallet. This means Electrum 1. This is expected behavior. Restart Electrum 2 after the upgrade is complete and your addresses will be available.

Offline copies of Electrum will not show the addresses at all because it cannot synchronize with the network. You can force an offline generation of a few addresses by typing the following into transaction fee per kb electrum Console: Read the Docs v:

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That's how much it'd cost me to send 0. And this is actually quite cheap compared to a few days ago, when transaction fees were even higher, making Bitcoin barely usable for microtransactions. And cheap transactions, especially for small amounts of BTC, are supposedly one of Bitcoin's biggest advantages. Yes, you can now tip strippers with Bitcoin. The transaction fees are raging due to several factors. One is the size of the block in Bitcoin's blockchain, which is limiting the number of transactions that can go through at any given time.

Bitcoin's network is powered by miners, people and companies who use a tremendous amount of computing power to create new bitcoins. And when there's too many transactions to process—which currently happens very often—miners will prioritize transactions that pay a higher fee.

The situation improved with the recent SegWit upgrade of the Bitcoin software, but it will take a while—weeks or months—before users start seeing benefits of SegWit. Another reason is Bitcoin Cash, a competing cryptocurrency that split off from Bitcoin on August 1.

Since the two cryptocurrencies are similar, it's simple for miners to switch from mining Bitcoin to Bitcoin Cash. And for reasons explained here , sometimes it's more profitable to mine Bitcoin Cash than Bitcoin.

Whenever miners start switching to Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin's network becomes slower, and transaction fees rise; we've seen this swing happen a couple of times before and it's likely to keep happening for a while. This is not good for Bitcoin.

A few bucks or even a few dozen bucks per transaction isn't a deal breaker for investors, but for someone who wants to use Bitcoin as payment—which is kind of the point of Bitcoin in the first place—that's far too expensive. The good news is that the fees are likely to get better. The bad news is that it won't happen very soon. SegWit has paved the way for a further upgrade called the Lightning Network , which should vastly reduce fees, but the software, or even its specifications, aren't ready yet.

This will reduce strain on the network and make transaction fees lower, but switching to SegWit2x requires a so-called hard fork, meaning that Bitcoin is once again splitting into two, which could bring new trouble. Luckily, Bitcoin users aren't completely without options right now.

One thing you can do is wait until the network is less strained at night, during the weekend , which is when transaction fees will go down. You can also check this service to see which transaction fees are currently the most economic for you.

At the time of this writing, a Bitcoin fee of satoshis per byte will be enough for your transaction to go through in about 30 minutes Bitcoin transaction fees are expressed in satoshis , which is one hundred millionth of a Bitcoin, per byte size of the transaction, which is typically a little over bytes. Have in mind that fee estimators aren't perfect; an alternative service that shows you the currently optimal fee is this one. Paying a fee that's too high is unnecessary, as it doesn't carry any additional benefit.

But paying too small a fee means your transaction won't go through fast, or at all. This information won't help you much if you use a wallet that doesn't let you change transaction fees, so maybe it's time to switch to a different wallet. For example, a mobile Bitcoin wallet called Mycelium offers several possibilities for Bitcoin transaction fees: If you choose the low-priority fee, your transaction might take longer to go through but it will be cheaper.

Conversely, a high priority transaction will almost surely go through quickly but it will be expensive. For even more control, you could try out the Electrum wallet , which lets you set any fee for your transactions, though you need to enable the option manually in the settings.

If you choose too small a fee, your transaction might forever stay in Bitcoin's backlog. Coinomi is another mobile-only wallet which lets you customize your transaction fees.

There are other things you could do to make transaction fees lower, though it requires a slightly higher level of knowledge. If you've received a lot of small transactions to a Bitcoin address, and then send bitcoins from that address, the transaction will be larger in bytes and thus more expensive. If you enable the "Coins" tab in the desktop version of Electrum you can minimize the number of inputs for your transaction, which will make it cheaper. If you're moving bitcoins from an exchange and not a wallet, you likely won't be able to set a fee, and many exchanges have very high fees set up.

Exchanges mostly don't do that because they're evil; they do it because they want to make sure the transaction went through, or else they'll need to deal with support tickets. Unfortunately, at this point there's little you can do about this besides find an exchange that is a bit more reasonable with this regard than others. Have in mind that, on top of transaction fees, exchanges will likely charge their own additional fees, so you should focus on the total costs.

Bitcoin fees are currently very expensive, but this will likely get better in a few months. But even right now, by choosing the right wallet and making sure you use the optimal fee, you'll do a lot better than just paying whichever fee you're offered. We're using cookies to improve your experience. Click Here to find out more. Tech Like Follow Follow. Fly across the water with this motorized body board.