Topic: Electrum Server (Read 634 times)

It depends, few people simply prefer using Electrum over Bitcoin Core to manage their Bitcoin due to Electrum UI or feature (e.g. mnemonic backup/restore).

There is also that Personal Electrum Server, and it can run a pruned bitcoin node. It's specific to your wallet or seed or address or something like that.

it depends on how you are setting up and using that "electrum server". for example if it is on the same computer then you are right, there is no point. but usually people run it on another computer or an actual "server" like Amazon VPS, it is online 24/7 that way and you just connect to that IP address. or maybe you have multiple wallets (on desktop at home, desktop at work, phone, laptop,...) and connect all of them to that one server you yourself run. that way you have control and functionality and can keep your privacy.

All your requests (ie. address balance history, sending transactions etc)... go through whatever is listed in "Server"... so, in your screenshot above "electrum2.hodlister.co" (also highlighted with a * in the node list).

The "nodes" you are connected to provide Blockheader information and help determine what Electrum considers to be the "longest chain" etc


Short answer... NO.

Longer Answer:


Also... try clicking the "?" buttons in Electrum... The "Status" one shows this:


The "Server" one shows this:

ok, so this is interesting.  i decided to look:





i'm connected to 7 different nodes at once.  did i get my addy balances from all 7 and in what proportion?  or did i just get them from electrum2.hodlister.co?

I may be wrong, but I always though you only connected to a single server at once? Like, you can use multiple servers in a short period of time (e.g every time you restart Electrum it can choose a different server), but since in the server list window it only shows a single connected server and there isn't even space for a multi listing, I believe you don't connect to multiple servers at once.

so do we know how many servers Electrum pulls balances from in Auto mode?  will it sometimes just pull from one?

can one run an ElectrumX server with Bitcoin Core in prune mode?

Correct... generally the best course of action would be to leave it on "Auto"... and simply use a VPN to hide your IP if that is your sole concern (and you're not wanting to run a personal server etc).

i just read your link and it says this, which is confusing in the sense that this entire discussion is premised on the idea that Electrum is connecting to ONE potentially malicious server.  which is it?:

This is because normally Electrum connects to a few different servers and downloads block headers and checks that they match. This prevents / makes it more difficult for Rogue servers to send you bad information.


edit:  seems to me one should avoid setting the network server to a specific Electrum node but instead leave it on automatic to hopefully connect to multiple servers for your addy balances (assuming you aren't going to use a personal server or want to use a VPN instead).

From where I sit, other option is to run Tails OS that has Electrum client  as one of its apps and communicate with server via TOR network.

Electrum, the wallet itself, is a light client. Just like the Bitcoin Wallet for Android is a light client.

Those things need to connect to either other full nodes, or servers (which are in turn hosting full nodes.) The Bitcoin Wallet is SPV so it connects directly to other full nodes, and you can specify it only connects to one node (maybe your full node that runs at home).

Electrum tries to connect to several different Electrum servers, so it's possible it can get your wallet balance of different addresses from different servers who won't know all the same addresses.

But running your own Electrum server is the only know to know for sure that you don't leak out any of that address info because you're running a full node.

You could run the full node on a separate server, and Electrum wallet client runs at your own computer or on your mobile device.

I happen to have a server and workstation at home, so I just simply run a full node. Eventually I might run my own personal Electrum server just for myself. (Or as another use did, make it a semi-private server and offer to whitelist your ip address so you can connect your Electrum wallet to my Electrum server.; but then you'd have to trust that I'm too lazy to record anything and not keep records.)

As for IP address:

You could do one step further and rent a VPS, install Electrum on it, then remote to it, but then you'd have to trust the VPS provider. Maybe just get a VPS and run a personal VPN on it.

If you're just trying to obscure your IP... your options are TOR (or some other VPN). Although, running via VPNs has been the cause of issues for folks in the past. Mostly the inability to connect to servers and/or sync.

More info here: https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tor.html

i guess it was a stupid question.  you send it a list of addy's you want from your specific IP (hidden or not) and then the server gathers them up and has to send the info back to your IP.  thus, you wallet addy's are aggregated with total balance known. 

i still don't get the idea of running a personal Electrum server when you have to run a full node right beside it.  is it b/c of the enhanced functionality?  with Andrew Chow's HWI, my guess that Electrum's advantages are becoming much less of a distinction now?

AFAIK your wallet sends the addresses it wants to know the balance/transaction to the node (server), the node figures out this info and sends the balance and transactions data back to you. Your wallet (client) is the one that initially knows the addresses, which are originated from the wallet seed.

Was that your question? (I may have misinterpreted it).

how does the Electrum node aggregate your addresses to your particular wallet?  is it b/c your specific request for your addy's are bundled or linked to a specific session?

Yes, but only your IP. The server stills gets a list of your addresses (which could be bad for privacy).

Electrum is a convenience that obviously costs a bit of privacy. If you want full privacy, then running a full node is probably the answer.

this need to run a full Bitcoin node makes no sense to me.  the whole purpose of an lightweight client like Electrum was to avoid this.

would running Electrum behind a VPN be sufficient to obscure my IP address?

I guess it depends on your use case... if you just want it for personal use, then like I said, electrs works well, but I've no idea how it would handle being a "public" (or whitelist) server with multiple concurrent connections.

I looked at the other implementations, but from memory they would require me to resync Bitcoin Core from scratch.

Yeah, what's a good server for electrum? I see a bunch of different implementations, electrumx, and electrum for personal by belcher i think, and a few others.

There was even this guy running Electrum for private users in this forum, I might just set one up too ... "Dabs Electrum Server that does not log, but you can still use Tor."

I have been using "electrs" pretty much exclusively for my Electrum for a while now... I actually run it in an Ubuntu container using the "Windows Subsystem for Linux"

It runs fine for my single user use-case... not idea what it would be like as a "public" server.