Topic: Using Electrum via Proxy (Read 807 times)

Firstly... Electrum isn't a "web wallet". It's a desktop client (or mobile if you are using the Android version).

Also, the proxy functionality in Electrum is not just for Tor... some folks might be using networks that are being "restricted" or filtered. Sometimes using a proxy server can bypass these restrictions and allow you to connect to the service that you're after, like an Electrum server

I usually don't have the habit of replying on a thread that's a year old... I usually just report the new post to a moderator and have it removed due to necroposting...
But, it seems you're new to this forum, and your question might not have been completely answered in this thread, so i guess it might be nice to cut you some slack.

You are right, electrum IS a wallet, and it does not HAVE to use the tor proxy. It's fine to run your wallet connecting to clearnet nodes, BUT, those clearnet nodes WILL be able to log your ip and the addresses you request. So, in theory, a node owner will know your ip and part of your unspent outputs... This is why some people prefer extra privacy by running a tor client and using this client as a proxy. By doing this, they hide their ip from the electrum nodes they connect to.
A different sollution sometimes used is running a full node, then installing electrs or electrumx and connecting to your own node... That way you are 100% sure the node owner isn't malicious.

In the future, just as a general rule of thumb: the forum has some rules against necroposting (posting in a thread that hasn't been posted in for a long time), so if you have questions like these, you can open a new thread or PM somebody in the original thread

Your screenshot shows your domain... I realise by the fact that you wiped out your tld in some parts of the screenshot you want to keep this info private, so maybe you can remove the screenshot and replace it by a censored one

This being said, i did visit your domain, and it seems like your tld already has an x3 certificate... Is your btcpayserver located on a subdomain? In this case you have to make sure the correct block exists in your nginx site config and you have to execute:

certbot --nginx -d sub.domain.com

It's the subdomain you want a certificate for in case you installed btcpayserver on a subdomain (like i did).

Now, the error you see seems to be rather common... A quick google resulted in sollutions like this one: https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/solved-the-client-lacks-sufficient-authorization-404-not-found/50894
Apparently, in this case, the posted deleted the AAAA record for his domain to solve the problem, but the post also helps the poster with some initial troubleshooting, you can repeat the steps they told him to do some troubleshooting for yourself

This being said, certbot does not have any authorisation towards your zone editor, it cannot modify dns zones all by itself, i have no idear how those records were entered?
Are you 100% certain you didn't do this? Did you ask support from somebody who is authorised to edit zone record (your hosting company for example?)? Did you give credentials to a thirth party (a partner, a friend)?

After some tinkering around in nginx and certbot, I realized that I never actually created server blocks for Let's Encrypt to verify, LOL

I created the server block for my domain and tried to run certbot to obtain my SSL certificates, and ran into a weird error... not sure if you might know what's going on:

https://i.imgur.com/RyWDyzW.jpg

After doing this, I checked the DNS Zone Editor of my site and the DNS records list a bunch of TXT records that I haven't seen before 

i think you do need a tld (domainname) if you want to use certbot... IIRC, you'd have to execute following command after nginx is running correctly:


There's always the option of creating a self signed certificate, but you'll probably be confronted with warning messages later on if you do so...

Hi Mocacinno,

I followed your sequence and got everything to run correctly from bitcoind to NBXplorer and BTCPayServer. From there I figured that I needed to continue the setup of BTCPayServer to run on my site so I followed the guide here to do it manually: [quotehttps://docs.btcpayserver.org/ManualDeploymentExtended/[/quote]

I skipped ahead to the nginx Let's Encrypt section and attempted to use certbot to get my TLS certificate and get everything set up. I think I'm running into yet another problem with setting up certificates here.

I followed the first two commands and restarted nginx, then tried to check Let's Encrypt and when I typed the command:

I got the following prompt:

Now I think this is happening because I input some code snippet incorrectly, perhaps something to do with writing down the SSL certificate URLs on the configuration file for nginx, but I'm not sure. Some guidance would be appreciated if possible  Thanks!

The correct sequence is:
start bitcoind as a daemon:


Wait untill it's running, if you're unsure wait 5 minutes then look at the debug.log
press ctrl+c if you're sure bitcoind is running

nbxplorer connects to bitcoind. It builds a database of unspent outputs and lets other services query this database.
nbxlorer needs to be running so btcpayserver can use it's services!

in order to do this, you'll eventually make a service, but for now, open a screen session (it's possible you'll need to install screen first)

within this screen session, start nbxplorer... Without killing nbxplorer, leave your screen session by pressing cltr-a, release ctrl-a, then press the letter d

now, wait another 5 minutes to make sure nbxplorer is properly running, then check if it's listening on port 24445 like we configured

here's what i see when looking at my server:

without starting btcpayserver you won't see these connections, but you should see some output... If you don't get any return, nbxplorer is not listening on the correct port

now, open a second screen session

and run btcpayserver in this screen session

you don't need to do anything with the run.sh bash script. The only thing this script contains is the command you're running right now:
dotnet run --no-launch-profile --no-build -c Release -p ~/source/btcpayserver/BTCPayServer/BTCPayServer.csproj --@

for shutting down, it's exactly the opposite order:
take over the btcpayserver screen by finding out the pid of the 2 screen sessions:

then take over the screen session of btcpayserver
ctrl-c
you can stop this screen session by giving the following command withing the screen session


then stop the nbxplorer in the same way as you stopped btcpayserver

then stop bitcoin daemon by entering

Hi Mocacinno, below I've included a snippet of code detailing what happens when I try to run the service how you've explained to do:


It seems like the NBXplorer service is failing for some reason. However, when I go into the NBXplorer directory and try to run the dotnet run -- command it seems fine:


Do I need to change something about how NBXplorer is running? If I have a service that starts NBXplorer when the raspberry pi turns on, will that solve my issue?

One more note, I'm confused on how/where to use the run.sh command, and if necessary, how to copy the command into a service file to run it.

I start mine using a service, but the service does not execute either of these bash scripts:

/usr/bin/dotnet run --no-launch-profile --no-build -c Release -p "/[~]/btcpayserver/BTCPayServer/BTCPayServer.csproj" -- $@


I've stopped my service and ran above command in the shell so i could capture the output:


EDIT: i suddenly remember why i start btcpayserver with these parameters
if you cat run.sh you'll see the following:


So, i basically opened run.sh, copyd the command into a service file and ran it from there...

Could you try starting btcpayserver with the command i posted above (change the path to the correct one instead)

You have a valid point @mocacinno ...

With this in mind I decided to delete the docker files and try to reinstall BTCPayServer using a manual setup following the guide here:


I hadn't installed PostGreSQL on my Pi yet so I followed this guide to try and set it up. Created a username and password and copied my lightning fingerprint into the settings.config and ran into an issue on...

Step 4: Install BTCPayServer

I ran into a problem verifying the install worked correctly using dotnet. I tried running the command:


and was met with this big wall of warnings and errors: https://i.imgur.com/zEqDtjf.jpg

More confusion...  looking for some guidance. Thanks!

Personally, i'm not a big fan of fetching and running docker containers from some repo... I know btcpayserver actually advises you to run a docker container instead of doing a manual setup, but how do you know what you're doing and how are you sure everything is configured as you want it to be if you only fetch and run a container somebody else prepared for you?

I do run docker containers @ work from time to time, but those containers were prepared by collegues of mine and kept in an internal repo. Since the management told us it's ok if we use these containers, i see little harm in this... But i do see harm in running containers prepared by somebody you don't know.

Source: https://xkcd.com/1988/

Source: https://xkcd.com/1988/

Needless to say, i did a manual setup, so i can share what i did..

I configured btcpayserver:
/[~]/.btcpayserver/Main/settings.config

so, basically, my btcpayserver listens on port 23001 and listens on all interfaces, I added the nbxplorer uri (http://127.0.0.1:24445), the lightning config (which isn't needed if you don't plan on accepting lightning payments) and info about my db/

After this, i added following to my apache virtual hosts:

This way, apache proxys requests on port 443 to my btcpayserver (port 23001 as configured above).

My a-record btcpay.mocacinno.com points towards the ip of the host where i did this setup. Also: the SSLCertifate* lines were added by certbot

About the services: don't worry about them untill you have everything up and running withing a screen session.

@HCP, as a noob, just confused that I had to run it through a directory as there have been other things I've run that did not need to go through a directory.

@Mocacinno, thanks for the advice. Once everything is set up, I will create a set of services that runs these things as soon as I turn on the raspberry pi, but I'm not sure how to do that.

I managed to download BTCPayServer-Docker on the pi and got it to run successfully. I set up a host A record on my website that is supposed to use BTCPayServer (btcpay.website.com) but it's not working and I'm not sure how to proceed (maybe it's related to the ports or something, I can't find where to change those). Maybe you can provide some insight? Thanks for sticking around in the thread!

Why do you think it is weird? It seems like you're going into the local NBXplorer github repo directory that you created and then running NBXplorer from there. Why is that weird?

And what do you mean by "running the command through a different directory"? Do you mean different to how mocacinno is using NBXplorer? or different to something else you were expecting??!?

I'm happy to hear you finally got it working
As for your questions:

• Well, your screenshot shows it's running, so it should be fine.. You did terminate the application before it started syncing...
• You don't use it... Btcpayserver uses nbxplorer. Nbxplorer isn't a block explorer in the classical sense, it's just an utxo tracker... It's not usefull for you, but super-usefull for btcpayserver
• yup

Ideally, you should be creating 3 services:
1) a service to start bitcoind
2) a service to start nbxplorer, depending on the first service
3) a service to start btcpayserver, depending on the second service

But for now, you could start bitcoind manually as a daemon, and start nbxplorer (and btcpayserver) in a screen session. However, as soon as you have everything running in a screen session, create those service files!!! screen is great for debugging, not for production.

So after lots of troubleshooting and internet searching, I've made some progress!

I found the folder ~/.nbxplorer/Main/settings.config and had to uncomment the following code snippets:
I saved this and found the bitcoin.conf file by entering the following command:
and edited the file to add these missing lines:

Finally, and this is weird, to run NBXplorer I had to go to the directory:


and enter the command:


It seems like NBXplorer actually ran successfully: https://i.imgur.com/U2aXSxR.jpg

I have three questions stemming from this:

• Why did I need to use the dotnet run -- command through a different directory, and is this okay?
• How do I know NBXplorer is running? How do I use it?
• Is the next step to set up btcpayserver?

Well, if i understand correctly, you're saying that nbxplorer did not have the necessary config file, and once you generated said file there was a "permission denied"-error...

I think it's a safe bet your problem is probably related to this config file... It's settings are necessary, it's not optional.

I start my nbxplorer as a service with following parameters:
/usr/bin/dotnet "/[path to nbxplorer]/NBXplorer/bin/Release/netcoreapp2.1/NBXplorer.dll" -c /[path to config]/.nbxplorer/Main/settings.config

So, you have to make sure the user/pass in settings.config match the ones in bitcoin.conf, you have to start nbxplorer with the -c parameter pointing to the settings.config AND you have to make sure there are no "permission denied" messages by changing the permissions or running as the correct user.

Hi mocacinno,

- Bitcoind does appear to be running on the bitcoin user on the pi, can execute "lsof -i :8332" on the bitcoin user and get some feedback but on any other user the command does not return any information.
- I opened the bitcoin.conf file and was able to find the information you supplied in your post.

It seems like NBXplorer does not have a config file as entering that code results in an error stating the file can't be found, and one command led to a "Permission denied" error.

Not sure if I installed Dotnet or NBXplorer incorrectly. I would appreciate some further guidance in this. Thank you so much for all your help so far, you've been a big help. Looking forward to a reply, cheers.

A couple of potential issues:

• bitcoind, is it running, can you execute "lsof -i :8332"
• I've listed my bitcoin.conf and  nbxplore config's underneath

Do notice the rpcuser/rpcpassword from bitcoin.conf match the user and pass in settings.config

bitcoind: ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf

nbxplore: ~/.nbxplorer/Main/settings.config

What arguments are you using to start up bitcoind/Bitcoin Core? What options do you have set in your bitcoin.conf?

I downloaded .NET Core 3.1.8 (ARM32) and installed it using the following commands:

sudo mkdir -p $HOME/dotnet
sudo tar zxf ~/Downloads/dotnet-sdk-3.1.402-linux-arm.tar.gz -C $HOME/dotnet
export DOTNET_ROOT=$HOME/dotnet
export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/dotnet

Then ran

sudo nano .profile

and added the path commands to the end of the file to permanently link them to the command line to call the dotnet list of commands.

Then I installed NBXplorer following a YouTube guide and entered the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/dgarage/NBXplorer
cd NBXplorer/NBxplorer
dotnet run -- --help

Finally, tried to enter the command

dotnet run --

and was met with this RPC server error:
https://i.imgur.com/3ZxFsUa.jpg

Not sure why the RPC server is unable to connect. Hoping that I can get some clarity on this so I can proceed, it looks like the YouTube video I watched referenced a cookie file on their computer but since I am trying to do this over the Pi I cannot find the right file and it seems like the rpccookiefile command does not work (if I even need it, not sure).