Topic: Electrum … simple for newbies (Read 283 times)

One thing that took me awhile to wrap my head around with BTC:  the notion that my software/computers/wallets did NOT hold any coins.  The understanding that ALL BTC are held in a publicly available blockchain seems counter intuitive when you are starting out.  As that understanding sinks in you realize that all this software and stuff does is gives you the access password for addresses.  It makes it all easy actually because the coins are held safely.  Now the risk comes with protecting your passphrases (private keys) so that nobody else gets your "signature" and can take all your coins.  Its easy to protect yourself and is much safer than holding physical fiat coins.  Physical coins can get stolen and they can't be sent around the globe except very slowly in a package.  BTC is postured to be the future.  Electrum is a great software written to take us to the next generation of commerce - BTC.  Thomas, great work!!

As a newbie, I read a lot about electrum, saw lots of post from others (newbies) and realized that most of peoples have a false idea of how BTC tx and Electrum are connected.

In fact WALLET is not the best word to qualify Electrum, I think that LINK is a better one :
-   In my pocket my wallet can contains banknotes or coins  coming  at anytime from everywhere
-   On my PC my Electrum wallet contains only information about addresses generated by itself (it’s not possible to include addresses generated outside of Electrum,  as far as I know)
The real content of MY Electrum wallet is’nt on my computer (or phone) but outside in the BTC Cloud that means the community of servers.
My wallet is unique only due to the seed which is the key for the software to generate addresses: the oldest can be used and so are present among the servers and the others remains as potential ones (as long Electrum reveal only the 20 next (by default) ) and could be thousands or millions.
Even if there is a physical copy of the addresses on MY computer, each time I open an electrum wallet the software synchronize with the server(s) and explore all the addresses created by the singular seed until it reaches 20 unknown on servers.
So each time you have a problem to retrieve or restore an existing wallet the best way to get the accurate position is to create a new wallet with the existing seed which makes the link with the servers.
No way to bore yourself about problems with restoring old wallets or old releases of the software.
Exception :  There is one information which is only  INSIDE the wallet and can't be retrieve with the seed: that’s the label which is your personnal data linked to the address : as it’s not included in the transaction format, it can’t exist on the servers and so is not retrievable .

Hope that could be useful to keep cool using Electrum