Topic: Ledger with Electrum seed (Read 267 times)

Did you actually read what I wrote?
"Electrum claims that their seed generation is better"
Exactly what you said in the end.

I just don't think that their "better" method, used only by them, and only by vanity, at the expenses of community and compatibility problems  should be used. They should just be like everyone else, as they are not better than anyone and  community accepted bip39 standard, not Electrum standard.

Did you actually read the link that BitCryptex provided above? It spells it out pretty clearly in the "Motivation" section why they are doing this...

Namely... no more reliance on a "fixed" wordlist... and the seed version number helps solves the problem of "what derivation path/address type should I be using to restore?"... so rather than try ALL combinations of address type when restoring, you only need restore the one that is actually needed.

They do this at the expense of compatibility with BIP39 wallets... as they consider their method better.


The entire use case is pointless... you'd simply initialise the Ledger, then send the existing funds to your Ledger. The transaction cost is minimal... the "security" increase is not

I was thinking about it, and if you do everything correctly it should be a cold storage
The problems show up when you need to spend for example.
But as you are saying, generating the keys in tails and using those keys in ledger to spend.... You should be fine.

I wouldn't risk anyway, as you have nothing to gain and you are not using the lledger device properly (as recommended by the manufacturer)

Yes, printer, other USBs can be a risk.
But offline Tails still hot wallet?!? Windows can't even read it.  Can you please point me to doc/info that offline Tails is a hot wallet?

No. It is not safe and this topic has been discussed over and over again.

There are far too many risks, too many weak points you are not considering in your setup, and it is not as safe as a hardware wallet.
Even using live is stick and  tails it is still a hot wallet if it was generated in a computer which had internet connection before or after or during the seed generation.

Maybe someone will never hack you and you will be fine. But will you risk your saving there? You shouldn't. Specially if you have a hardware wallet. You can just set fees for 1 sat byte and transfer all your brc to a safer wallet for less than 0.20usd. you should.

Not at all. Nowadays it's cheap to put a live OS onto a stick and do all the operations safely offline. Tails OS has Electrum on it. Handy.
Indeed, average user may (should!) create a new seed on Ledger and transfer the funds.

But what if an user wants to save some seeds like he would save paper wallets without buying a Ledger yet? If he can do it offline he's safe, isn't it? He has to write down the seed and keep at hand 1-2 addresses from the list. And for this use case, Electrum can trick somebody. It did surprise me. That's all.


Again, this was just a test I've done. I do have a Ledger and I can generate the seed with that even for "paper wallet"-like use, if I want to. Or I can just keep all my funds on Ledger.

He is just conducting the test to see if the seed generated by Electrum can work in Ledger HW, but that test should not be put into practice for the security reasons you have already mentioned. Seed created in any desktop/mobile wallet should never be used in HW, except of course for testing purposes, as is the case here.

I think Electrum seed compatibility is not so important when it comes to HW, but I agree that users should be warned in some way that the seed generated in Electrum will not work in some other crypto wallets.

I don't know exactly what you are doing.
But if someone has btc in a wallet a then he buys a ledger, he should never try to use the same seed.

This defeats the whole purpose of using a hardware wallet. Because you are using a seed generated in an online device.

What makes hardware wallets relevant is because it allows you to create a seed in offline environment. This is what makes it cold storage

Yeah. I missed an important thing in my first post.
What I was doing was a test. A test for the use case one buys/holds Bitcoin before buying a Ledger. I'll add this to start.

You're right, there's clearly no point using something else when one already has Ledger.



I completely agree to this and basically this is the main reason I've made this topic.
Electrum should at least write a big warning in the seed window that the seed they generate may not work elsewhere.

The first one must be a coincidence;
since Electrum also uses the same set of words as BIP39, there's a chance that the last word checksum will be valid for BIP39.

I would stick with native Electrum seed for Electrum client. Because it automatically restore the correct wallet type depending on the seed.
One exception is when creating P2SH-Segwit wallet, I prefer BIP39 seed over Electrum seed with checked "BIP39" in the option (invalid checksum).
But with Ledger? there's no point in using iancoleman.

Even if the development somehow stopped, I'm sure there will be Electrum backups, clients or tools that still support its seed.

Electrum claims that their seed generation is better than bip39, so they won't change their eccentric seed .
But I see no reason for this, and it only causes confusion (which we already have too much around here). Why are they doing this?

I have at least one seed generated by Electrum which works just fine with Ledger.
The seeds generated by Electrum this evening were not working. So I can import them into Electrum, but I see no guarantee it can be imported in something else.

I see now their reasons, thanks for the link.

Electrum introduced the seed two years before BIP39 was released. It derives the private keys in a bit different way. Here you can read why Electrum does not generate BIP39 seeds. You can import them, though. What attempts are you referring to?

This is somewhat unexpected for me. I was doing some tests, so no funds are lost. As a matter of fact, I will even publish the seed phrase(s).
But I think that others should also know about this.

I tried to generate a Legacy wallet on Electrum (3.3. and import/restore it on Ledger (1.5.5). The seed is seed 1 (*).
All the words were fine, just at the end it tells "Recovery phrase is not valid". I tried again with Electrum same words, all is good, wallet imported and works.
I thought it may be related to the fact the old wallet I had on Ledger was SegWit, but no.

I went then to https://iancoleman.io/bip39/ and the Electrum seed was also declared invalid. After checking and unchecking there "Show entropy details", the last word of the seed was changed/corrected, see seed 2 (*).
Of course, this one works with Ledger and the addresses are not the same for the wallets from the 2 different seeds.

However, it's a big disappointment for me from Electrum. I knew that it's not 100% compatible with BIP39, but it's different when this happens to you, especially after previous attempts working.
The lesson is, probably to generate with Ian Coleman's site and use it with or without Ledger.
Thoughts?


The seeds:
seed 1: vital flavor judge caught parade anchor rifle auto twist leg wrist stage
seed 2: vital flavor judge caught parade anchor rifle auto twist leg wrist steel

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Edit: I've forget to write this from start: it was a test for the use case one buys/holds Bitcoin before buying a Ledger. After one has a Ledger, he's going to use that Ledger.