Topic: How safe is Electrum wallet? (Read 564 times)

You can format that computer and your wallet remains safe as long as you keep those seed words safe. Thats how safe Electrum is. In fact, it is much safer than the actual privatekey, which is a practice long abandoned due to higher risks.

The seed words serve to recover the private key anywhere. They are the most vital thing to protect, you can forget the wallet password and it doesn't matter, but this does. In fact you don't even need a backup, as long as you keep these words safe.

There is a method to obtain the privatekey, but it is intentionally hidden away, you should not be touching the privatekey directly ever. And, it would be wise to always handle wallets using a secure OS, such as Linux. If you are paranoid, you can boot a Live DVD/usbstick from a computer without internet (or hard drive) to handle the wallet creation.

If you have the expertise to run your own Electrum server (ElectrumX I think), and you only use that to connect your desktop and mobile Electrum wallets, that might increase the safety factor a little bit. It's already safe as is, just be careful when you get any odd looking error messages, they can be spoofed by malicious servers.

I like electrum, it is a simple, powerful and convenient tool. In combination with the hardware wallet, the electrum provides excellent reliability and flexibility in controlling the outputs and the size of fee. I can recommend that all beginners use it; of the many alternatives, electrum is one of the best. My choice is electrum portable + ledger nano s, and I sleep well.

Electrum is a wallet software and this provides more security than online wallet. Although it's not the safest wallet, compared to hardware wallet. But it is safe because electrum has lots of extra security features. Such as seed phrase, the encrypted wallet file containing private key is protected with a password and also two-factor authentication. This also adds extra security to the wallet.

As an addendum, here's a guide on how to set that up:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/guide-how-to-create-a-watch-only-wallet-for-electrum-4573616

If you don't have an extra computer that you can use for this, you can very easily use any extra flash drives you have lying around -- you only have to install a persistent copy of Linux that you can safely boot on any computer, or even persistent Tails. Just make sure you verify your initial download using the guide in electrum.org, and that you keep your seed in a safe place.

You can make one that doesn't directly connect to the internet.
Keep your keys offline by setting-up a standard wallet in a cold-storage device that holds the keys for signing and an online watch-only wallet using the offline's "master public key" for receiving/making transactions.

The SEED/Private keys are offline so there's no easy way to hack your wallet.
And even if you updated the online wallet with a fake version, your keys won't be compromised as it doesn't contain any private keys.

Electrum gives users control on their seeds, and they can choose Legacy or Segwit wallets to use.
Users of Electrum wallet must check official update announcement and update version on their website, and must remember that never download update version from any other channels, from social media with Electrum word in name because there are so many phishing Electrum sites around us.

To be safe, there is another thing to remember: Back up wallet in several locations and ways; and check that backup is good and can be used to recover your fund later, before upgrading wallet.

IMO, electrum is better than online wallet.
Of course, you need to update the electrum every time.

But in general view is it safe ?
As long as it's operated in internet, nowhere is totally safe but you can try to prevent it happening

Electrum can be quite confusing for first-time users.
Especially the receive-tab and the payment request can be irritating. Same for the units being displayed (i believe mBTC is still the standard?).

All of those nice features it offers (coin control, RBF, fee control, unit to be displayed) takes some time to get used to. At least for beginners who didn't use any other wallet at all.


Don't get me wrong, i agree with you. I would also recommend electrum to newbies. But mainly because it is a great wallet with a lot of functionality, not because it is extremely intuitive (which it isn't IMO).

I would request you to go through the thread shared below it has a detailed information on electrum and other wallet.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.16405643

How is Electrum not user friendly? It's much more user friendly compared to Core, because it has mnemonic seeds, ability to create signed transactions in GUI, easy coin control, and so on. It's all really easy and intuitive, Electrum is a good wallet for beginners, if I were to recommend a wallet to a newbie, I'd recommend Electrum.


Not true, Electrum is not private, since it relies on servers, and those servers can monitor your transactions. If you want privacy, run your own private Electrum server or just use Bitcoin Core.

Electrum is one of the oldest btc wallet it is attributes rich but it is not user friendly. If you are just a beginner and newbie like me I suggest you to avoid electrum, but if you’re familiar with the basic terms then this is the excellent selection for you to use. The characteristics of Electrum is on being fast, safe and private. The wallet is a lite wallet, meaning it does not download the blockchain, so there are no delays on system and it’s always up-to-date.

If you have save your seed & export your all private key then you are safe almost. But you should keep safe your data on multiple places. Because in case if lost your saved data then there is risk of lose your fund as well. Another most important thing is during update of your electrum wallet. Few days back we have seen multiple case that hacker successfully hacked few wallet by malware. During update they got control of wallet and in a result hackers moved fund into their address. That's why you should always be careful during update your wallet. It should redirect original website.

Electrum is a good wallet because users have controls on their seeds, and they also can modify some options  with coin control features to set transaction fees manually. Besides that, if someone is careful, and want to replace their transaction in case their first  attempt to move their coins fail due to low fees. They can do that with Enable Replace by fees option.
https://hackernoon.com/holy-cow-i-sent-a-bitcoin-transaction-with-too-low-fees-are-my-coins-lost-forever-7a865e2e45ba
Bitcoin Transaction Fees - Everything in one

electrum is not a service, it is more like a user friendly interface that allows you to communicate with the bitcoin network and only download what you need instead of everything.
and if you are to think that way and reject any wallet software that had bugs then you should not even use bitcoin because every single software that has ever been written for bitcoin had and still has bugs in them!

Electrum wallet is a very trusted software wallet.Its platform is very easy to hold coins securely.For this the wallet sign up is very easy and convinient to use. Its payment method is very easy which verify your transactions in some seconds also you don't have to download the whole blockchain.
Electrum wallet you can use on windows, mac os and linux operating system.You ca store your private key offline in a hardware wallet used in coexistence with electrum.

Electrum wallet had a few exploits where people injected supposed software upgrade links to phishing sites that captured people's passwords and where the legit servers were DoSS'ed, forcing people to use rogue servers. When this happens, people on the forum quickly report this and the developers path the exploits or puts warnings on their website and you upgrade the software to path the loopholes. 

I will never dump a lot of coins into wallets like this, because it is not a service that is meant for long-term storage of loads of coins. It is a nice wallet to use, if you buy something online once in a while and you want quick access to some coins. 

Electrum was vulnerable to phishing messages being sent by fraudulent individuals. This is no longer the case since the 3.3.4 version.
Whoever is using older versions than 3.3.3 should donwload the newest version from the official site to even avoid the possibility to receive such a message.

Lots of useful posts above, I would like to add one important thing for OP.
Safety of your funds depends upon two main components:
- Quality and security of wallet you use to store your coins.
- Your personal method use to protect your seeds and your devices

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- Quality and security of wallet you use to store your coins:
It is true that you never should choose bad-quality wallets to use, because they can crash, and it will become a nightmare if you already send bitcoin to that wallet, but have not yet backup seeds.
The high quality wallets means they are the most favorite aims to attack by hackers and bad guys who are always figure out ways to abuse bugs of wallets ans steal wallet users' funds. Don't worry about that because high quality wallets have strong team behind, who always upgrade their wallets and response fastly to any kind of attacks.

- Your personal method use to protect your seeds and your devices
As people mentioned in above posts, this is the way you backup your seeds and how you make and store seeds' backup are very important. You have to find out your best ways to do it to secure your seeds' backup, and guarentee that you can use those backups when you want to recover your wallets.

Secure your devices to make sure that in the meantime when wallets' developers fix their issues, you won't be abused by attackers. Addtionally, to make sure that your won't do stupid things when upgrade your wallets by downloading fake wallets that contain malwares, ie.

Secure your wallets has another important points that you should prepare what your family members have to do to get your funds in worst case when you pass away suddenly, like that:

You can export them, but remember you need software to recover private keys/public addresses from seed and in future software will change and it will be more problematic to recover keys from old seeds securely.
Most basic form of controling your funds are private keys, from private key you have full control and from private key you can create your public address.