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.