Electron Cash: bad experience with ok ending
This is my first post on steemit. I just want to share with you what I learned how to (better) work with the Electron Cash wallet under low trust conditions
There has been concerns about the trustworthyness of the Electrum wallet fork called Electron Cash which will use Bitcoin Cash after todays fork. A very good explanation was just posted by @kingscrown here
Also an explanation of how to safely use Electron Cash was posted by Electrum
- Install Electron Cash on a machine that does not have your Electrum wallets.
- Wait until the BCC hard fork has taken place, and a few BCC blocks have been mined.
- Move all your Electrum funds to a new Electrum wallet. This will move only your BTC, and not your BCC, because the BCC blockchain has replay protection. Wait until the transaction is confirmed.
- Enter the seed of your (now empty) old wallet or private keys in Electron Cash. Since the BTC have been moved to a new wallet, entering your old seed in Electron Cash will not put your BTC funds at risk.
However, I was not smart enough to find these warnings before installing Electron Cash (of course on the same machine as Electrum). So, I can confirm that it opens, and copies your existing Electrum wallet into its own, new wallet. It asks for your passphrase and when entered, displays your funds (same as in Electrum). At that point I got suspicious.
Just to be clear, I can't confirm any bad intensions of the developers. Maybe it was just thought as a convenience feature - still a weird idea to me.
I immediately closed Electron Cash, started Electrum and my funds were still there. But it felt insecure to leave them there, after about 15 min I transfered them to a non-Electrum based wallet. So it seems like I got off lightly... Whew!
If you are thinking of following the wise instructions above to safely use Electron Cash, here is a little twist I would prefer to avoid spoiling your wallets security if you intend to continue to use your wallet afterwards.
- Transfer your Electrum funds to a newly created wallet before the fork (that means within the next few hours, the fork will happen around noon UTC today)
- Wait for a few Bitcoin Cash blocks to be mined
- Empty the new wallet, eg. by transferring back to your original wallet
- Install and open Electron Cash on another machine and enter your seed of the now emptied newly created wallet to view your Bitcoin Cash
This way you can safely keep on using that wallet that you are used to. This might especially be helpful if you have distributed your receiveing address for donations or whatever reason. Or if you just dont want to hassle with storing safe copies of yet another seed.
So around July 27 I exported my BTC private key. Today I downloaded the electrum wallet, and entered my BTC private key. I had 1.7 BTC in my wallet, but now the electrum wallet says I only have 0.035 BCC...How can that be ? Did I do something wrong ?
Hi ,
There is server config problem with Electrum Cash wallet. YOu have to select the correct Bitcoincash chain manually to follow the right chain. Or it will automatically connect to the long bitcoin chain instead. You can read more about it here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6qyn18/electroncash_notice_how_to_select_bitcoincash/
Thanks a lot! It even works in original electrum wallet!
Did you mean you downloaded Electron Cash? Either way the amount showing is not equal to your known balance. I would be checking my address/s on the blockchain. Hopefully there are no tx's unknown to you and it's a bug/glitch/user error. I hope it turns out OK.
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I scanned Electron Cash on virus total yesterday. Three scanners reported a trojan on it. There are many reasons I don't support Electron Cash. One being that they don't offer binaries for Linux and when viewing the source I can't see much of a change in Electrum.
Update: Just scanned it again on virus total and no malware was reported. here are the results
I wouldn't put much stock into three detections on VirusTotal, generally. There are many very poor malware signatures and false positives.
Your probably right. I've actually created some malicious software in the past and uploaded it. The only time I would see any detections from virus total is when I would add hooking features to my software.
The past 72 hours have been hell for me with Bitcoin. I had a security issue and asked coinbase to disable my account they did it right away but when I asked then to enable it again they have not responded yet.
electrum and electron-cash are python scripts - compare the source & run it from source. This avoids the problem with trusting binaries.
Apart from the fact the the electron-cash code seems a quick hack, the changes to the upstream code are minimal and look harmless to me (didn't dig in deeply, though...)
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