How-to: Use Electrum Bitcoin Wallet in Whonix

Introduction[edit]

Electrum is a popular Bitcoin wallet. According to the Electrum FAQ:

How does Electrum work? Electrum’s focus is speed, with low resource usage and simplifying Bitcoin. Startup times are instant because it operates in conjunction with high-performance servers that handle the most complicated parts of the Bitcoin system.

Electrum does not need to download/verify the blockchain and users store their private keys locally.

This is an advantage over some other Bitcoin wallets which are affected by this: if the third-party server were ever compromised, all of the users' bitcoins could be stolen. There is also the possibility that the third-party could lose a user's private keys or walk away with them.

Warnings[edit]

Warning: This documentation is not comprehensive. It should not be viewed as a complete guide to cryptocurrency privacy and security, and does not cover all possible threats that can cause users to lose their cryptocurrency.

See also dedicated wiki pages:

Electrum is configured by electrum upstream default to use public third party servers. If users are not using their own self-hosted electrum server (ElectrumX), consider the following quote from the electrum upstream documentation Does Electrum trust servers?:

[...]
One of the servers, arbitrarily, is selected as the “main” server.

The client subscribes to its own addresses (nit: sha256 hashes of scriptPubKeys) so that it would be notified of new transactions touching them. It also synchronizes the existing history of its addresses. This means the client sacrifices some privacy to the server, as the server can now reasonably guess that all these addresses belong to the same entity.

As above, confirmed transactions are verified via SPV.

The server is trusted about unconfirmed transactions.

The server can lie by omission. That is, it can “forget” to mention (both confirmed and unconfirmed) transactions that are relevant to the client.

The main server is also used for fee estimates, and is trusted with those (low-high sanity limits are applied in the client)

The main server is also used to broadcast the transactions the client makes.
[...]

There can be no blanket recommendation for all users which Bitcoin wallet should be used. It depends on:

Technical skill.
Personal risk assignment.
Financial value in Bitcoin.
Time.
And probably other factors as well.

While Electrum has better usability (is easier to use), above warnings apply. However, for best security, the official Bitcoin client (bitcoin-qt) should be seriously considered for balances of Bitcoin representing serious financial value. For reasons, see Bitcoin Core.

Install Electrum[edit]

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Installed by default in Whonix-Workstation^™.

Version Numbers[edit]

Prerequisite knowledge: refer to the Frozen Packages and Application Specific Update Indicators entries in the Operating System Software and Updates chapter.

Should the user wish to use a newer version of Electrum than available in the packages.debian.org electrum package since Whonix is based on Debian, the user can optionally install Electrum using the usual instructions from the Electrum website. Recommendations from the

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