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spesmilo / electrum

Electrum Bitcoin Wallet
https://electrum.org
MIT License
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Electrum not asking seed type #7286

Open yleyvag opened 3 years ago

yleyvag commented 3 years ago

I'm trying to create a new legacy wallet but it's not working as it did before, it never ask me to choose between legacy or segwit, already tried 5 times creating new wallets but it doesn't work. I need legacy addresses, no segwit addresses.

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Transisto commented 3 years ago

Corroborating,

Doesn't seems right for backward compatibility.

SomberNight commented 3 years ago

This was an intentional change to simplify the wizard; it is mentioned in the release notes. https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/cad4e77853b1d3ae5fdaaa868c2fce67780a8870/RELEASE-NOTES#L28-L30

I need legacy addresses, no segwit addresses.

Why? Are you trying to use a service which still does not support sending to bech32 addresses? If so, what service is that?

You can use the make_seed command to create legacy seeds, e.g. $ electrum make_seed --seed_type=standard, or from GUI Console make_seed(seed_type="standard"). Alternatively you can pass the --nosegwit flag when starting the GUI.

Doesn't seems right for backward compatibility.

There is no point in keeping an option to create legacy ("standard") seeds forever.

Also, the move is not without precedent. Electrum 2.0 introduced the "standard" seeds, and it immediately removed generating new "old" type seeds. The "old" type seeds created uncompressed p2pkh addresses, while the "standard" seeds create compressed p2pkh addresses. The "segwit" type seeds create p2wpkh (witness v0) addresses. The only difference is that some software have been laggards in adding support for sending to p2wpkh addresses, and that is why we had a temporary period where the user could choose and either could be generated. The choice between "standard" and "segwit" was there for 3.5 years... Nowadays almost all software supports sending to bech32; and the ones that don't, should probably not be used anymore as it is questionable whether they are maintained at all.

ghost commented 2 years ago

Thank you, @SomberNight for the detailed explanation and all your work! electrum is the best!

I have an existing "standard seed", p2pkh. It's cold storage, backed up in a secure place and memorized. I don't want to create a new seed phrase as I couldn't trust my memory as much with the new seed phrase.

Now I want to use p2wpkh based on the same seed phrase.

Is that possible?

It would also be a lot work (and waste network fees) to migrate all my p2pkh addresses from my standard seed to the segwit seed type.

feature request maybe if this isn't existing:

If not, could you please re-introduce some way to use the wizard or a command line option?

Or could you mix multiple address types even within the same wallet?

By comparison, with a hardware wallet as keystore, one can have 1 seed phrase from which then all address types can be derived p2pkh, p2wpkh (and even altcoins). I don't think there's a reason in cryptography making that impossible for electrum to support both p2pkh, p2wpkh at the same time?