Topic: electrum wallet (Read 96 times)

Everything pooya87 said, plus my opinion below:

If you do things properly, with a cold single-sig wallet, the only thing that matters is where you store the device and the backup. So, in a sense, your efforts should be limited to protecting your devices physically.

There is a reason why every bitcoiner says that you should take small steps, so I always suggest the following steps in this order:

1. getting your money away from exchanges into a hot wallet.
2. familiarise with sending and receiving money outside of an exchange.
3. familiarise with backing up your private keys.
4. go to a cold storage device. I don't have a problem if the device is user friendly. If you feel better buying a trezor instead of setting up electrum on an airgaped computer, that's perfectly fine.
5. familiarise with the hardware wallet.
6. make sure to understand what you need to do to retrieve your coins if your device gets destroyed.
7. then consider multisig with multiple cold wallet signers.

The final step should be much easier if you have already taken steps 1-3, because you will have already seen a software wallet like electrum or sparrow.
It will also be easier because steps 4-6 will give you the necessary confidence that you can use hardware devices.

Essentially step 7 is a combination of steps 1-6.

The security of your wallet depends first and foremost on how you store the keys and how accessible they are for an attacker. They do not depend on how many keys is required to spend the coins. For example if you have a 15 of 15 multi-sig wallet but all 15 keys are stored in the same wallet, then security-wise it offers you no additional security compared to a single-sig wallet that only requires 1 key to sign the transactions.

Similarly the reason why a hardware wallet provides additional security is not because it can be multi-sig but because the keys in that wallet are not easily accessible to a third party.

If you own a hardware wallet and want to keep your coins inside of that, then simply receive your coins in the address you get from the hardware wallet instead of receiving it in another wallet then having to create a new transaction and pay additional fee to move it there.
Cut that additional and unnecessary step.

If I understand properly you have bitcoin on your electrum wallet which is on the desktop and since it is an online wallet you want more security. So yes bitcoin on a wallet that’s installed in a desktop which is connected to the internet is definitely not safe as we regard them as hot wallets  like the bitcoin on an hardware wallet which is called cold wallets, as such it will be a good idea to go for hardware and have a watch only wallet on the live or online desktop or you install the same electrum wallet in an airgapped device, that is a device that has never and can never go live on internet.

As for the multisig, the multi sig wallet adds an extra layer of security to hot wallets because one will need access to more than one of the co-signer. That is for example if it is 2-of-3 multi sig wallet, the hacker or scammer will need to get access to atleast two of the co-signers wallet before they can temper with the wallet, so it is a good security option. The only flaw to me is the multi sig should be created on different devices that is each device holds one co-signer. Using one device leaves the hacker with just one point of failure if they get to the device all the co-signers on the device can be accessed

If I do all my bitcoin purchase on desktop to an electrum wallet, is it really any help to use electrum's multi-sig wallet instead of the basic wallet? Since keeping bitcoin on a desktop is not as secure as a hardware wallet,  I'm thinking to immediately then move any purchases off of electrum to a hardware wallet which can be multi-sig.