Topic: Do 12 word Seed Ever Expire? (Read 179 times)
After reading your post I searched and deleted everything related to Electrum that I found. Thanks for the informative reply.
No, seeds will never expire.
Seeds are essentially random strings that are used to create private keys, so you can rebuild all addresses of your wallet with your seed alone. And since your Bitcoins are stored on blockchain, private key is everything you need to know to access them.
Afaik, Electrum seeds are not compatible with other wallets, so you can't just import them into other wallet, but this shouldn't be a big problem in case Electrum wallet will stop getting updates - it's an open source project so some other wallet might add support for Electrum seeds in the future if it will be needed, or you can use older versions of electrum to dump your private keys in WIF.
By the way, uninstalling Electrum might not necessarily mean that you have deleted your wallet, you should check the default folder of Electrum for any wallet files.
Seeds are essentially random strings that are used to create private keys, so you can rebuild all addresses of your wallet with your seed alone. And since your Bitcoins are stored on blockchain, private key is everything you need to know to access them.
Afaik, Electrum seeds are not compatible with other wallets, so you can't just import them into other wallet, but this shouldn't be a big problem in case Electrum wallet will stop getting updates - it's an open source project so some other wallet might add support for Electrum seeds in the future if it will be needed, or you can use older versions of electrum to dump your private keys in WIF.
By the way, uninstalling Electrum might not necessarily mean that you have deleted your wallet, you should check the default folder of Electrum for any wallet files.
I have a stupid question to ask. Recently I backed up my 12 word seed and uninstalled Electrum from my computer because i'm not planning to move my BTC anytime soon. Also i thought it would be safer to not have a hot wallet on my computer. But before uninstalling i forgot to back up my private keys. Now i'm wondering what would happen to my btc if Electrum goes out of business or things change in future releases. Will i be able to recover my coins using my seed words on another wallet? Do these seed words ever expire?
I really like Electrum but i don't want to reinstall it as i won't be using it for some time.
I really like Electrum but i don't want to reinstall it as i won't be using it for some time.
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