Hi All, If you would forgive me I am seeking opinions on an Electrum specific issue, and I also have a simple question that I'm sure you all know the answer to.

I started playing around with Electrum cold wallets and that feature is pretty nice. I also like that you can extend the seed phrase with customer words. I am thinking of using cold wallets to store some bitcoin for the longish term. However, I recently learned the Electrum seed phrase does not follow a standard, so I can only recover the keys from extended seed with Electrum itself.

How confident can I be that I will be able to recover my keys from an extended seed in the case Electrum ceases to exist, or the project is forced to shut down and its repositories purged, or Electrum no longer supports the current version, etc.?

Second question: It seems that a "watching wallet" generates 20 addresses initially, and I assume it will generate more as needed just like a normal wallet. However, how does the offline wallet know how many private keys to generate when I go to sign a spending transaction some day in the future? Do I need manually tell the cold wallet to keep generating keys until I get the right private key to sign with? Or does the cold wallet somehow "know" to keep generating keys until it finds one that can sign a transaction that it is presented with?

I suppose I could experiment, but I don't want to generate dozens of transactions just to test it out.

Thanks for your opinions.