Electrum has been my favorite Bitoin wallet software for a very long time. The reason I had a look at it initially was because there was a debian package. Only when Trezor hardware wallet support was added and was not yet released, I downloaded the sources. It is written in Python. I work with python regularly, but it is not my primary language. But for frequently updating and testing experimental software, it is pretty cool. That’s how I started to report bugs in the unreleased development branch, and sometimes even committing the patches myself.
But the reason I’m writing this post is, that the new 2.7 release contains two features that are important to me.
Ledger Nano S
One is that the Ledger devices now also support multisig with electrum. I took this as the trigger to order a Nano S. It works totally different from the HW1 in that it has a display. Thus you can set it up without an air gapped computer. With only the two buttons, you can navigate through the whole setup process. As a bonus it is also to my knowledge the first hardware device to store Ethereum tokens, not counting experiments such as quorum. So I finally moved my presales ETH.
Multisig with hardware wallets
I wrote about multisig with hardware wallets before. But Thomas took it a huge step further. Now it’s not only super secure, but also super user friendly. Now the hardware wallets are directly connected to the multisig wallet. No more saving unsigned transactions to files and load in the other wallet. You can still do that if you have the signing devices distributed geographically. Given a solid backup and redundancy strategy, you can now also have a 3 of 3 multisig hardware wallet. So your bitcoins would still be secure if your computer was hacked, and two of the three major BitCoin hardware wallets had a problem, which is very very unlikely.
The only thing still missing is the debian package for the 2.7 version.
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