So, I was curious to know what methods were used by Satoshi, Hal Finney and the first participants? Can anyone share links about?
I am sure Satoshi and Hal knew ways to generate valid bitcoin key-pairs without using Bitcoin's software. They were both skilled professionals in cryptography. You can definetely generate the key-pairs without ever touching any bitcoin related software.
I doubt they have done it though, because Bitcoin core is Satoshi's invention and it uses these techniques specifically.
Today I read some reports from users with problems related to Electrum on Tails.
Tails is just an OS that does this:
Tails always starts from the same clean state and everything you do disappears automatically when you shut down Tails
Electrum is a just a piece of software, developed in 2011. Electrum uses (as far as I know)
os.urandom() to generate entropy and combines it with some other input sources (user inputs, time etc.). You can even see the main dev talking about it back in 2013 here on this forum:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1746905My questions to you are:
1. how can Electrum face issues specifically on Tails OS?
2. where did you read these reports? You know how people behave usually, writting whatever they want. Don't trust everything you read.
However, if indeed you have spotted a problem regarding Electrum, let us know and we can inform the devs on github. It's fully open-source!