I am really hoping someone can help me.
Last year I decided to start buying some bitcoin. I chose the electrum platform after researching and hearing of its ease of use given I am not overly technical. I created a standard default wallet on electrum but dont recall being presented with any phrase or password at the time of creation. I bought a small amount of bitcoin from Bittylicious to test that the wallet was working. Once confirmed, given the risk to security, I decided to follow the advice of a web article and create a watch wallet. I did so using the master public key from my default wallet. The watch wallet was created instantly after inputting the master public key, again I dont recall any passwords or phrases being presented to me
Over the last year I have been adding bitcoin to my watch wallet using the receive address form my watch wallet. I started to become concerned when the transactions being shown in my watch wallet werent appearing in my default account. Upon further reading online I am now hearing I need to present seed phrases to access and spend my bitcoin in my watch wallet.
I dont recall ever seeing any phrases in either the setup of either the default or watch wallet and don't know what this is. Can someone help me understand what options I have. I am really worried I may never be able to access my bitcoin again and have lost a years worth of saving
Please help! Thanks in advance
Kind regards,
Matt
Electrum gives you seed words which are used to generate your wallet. This is a 12 or 13 word phrase. It forces you to confirm these seed words in order to create the wallet. Try to create a new wallet and you will see what this looks like.
Do you also have your other wallet setup or only the watch wallet setup? Without the seed words or private keys for the wallet, you would be unable to spend the coins.