Hi all. I'm considering using Electrum to store a large number of Bitcoins, but the deterministic wallet concerns me a bit.
I'm under the impression the completely random address generation of Bitcoin-QT is more secure, as a potentially attacker would need to guess every private key to spend your entire wallet.
While with Electrum only one secret (the seed) is required to spend the entire wallet
Am I correct here or am I completely missing something?
I really want to use Electrum, as I have an old netbook with very little storage that is struggling to hold the entire blockchain (< 900 MB remaining) and struggling dealing with Bitcoin-QT's IO requirements.
I really want to know if my concerns regarding deterministic wallets are valid.
Also, I suppose I should ask if Electrum can be used without a deterministic wallet?
You can use Electrum without any risk even if your seed is captured by a hacker. The seed doesnt give access to imported keys.
Generate some new keys using the javascript available on bitaddress.org and then import them into Electrum.
Importing keys into Electrum eliminates the concerns regarding a deterministic wallet by eliminating the deterministic wallet. You lose any benefit the deterministic wallet could offer and are left with a "random address" wallet.