Ha! Your thread was one that I found by searching when I was deciding between Start9 and Umbrel. And partly why I chose Start9. Thanks for that. So far quite pleased with Start9.

Regarding the migration issue with the blockchain noted earlier. Poking around, it looks like it would be easy just to copy the data into the appropriate folders in the Start9 installation. See: https://docs.start9.com/0.3.5.x/service-guides/bitcoin/blockchain-copy

I just set up a bitcoin node with Start9 on a $135 mini pc I got from amazon. Dead simple. No problem installing bitcoin core, electrs, LND and mempool. All work fine. There is a bit of a trick to setting up Electrum to connect to the server, but it is documented on start9s manual. I had to get some help from the start9 forum to use a regular connection over my LAN rather than TOR though to connect to electrs and bitcoind locally.

Also, while I was doing my research, I found page that details how to transition your blockchain to umbrel without downloading it all again, if you already have bitcoin core running somewhere local. I didn't save the page, but I think I could find it again if that helps.

Quick followup:

Turns out it is actually pretty easy to configure Start9 to allow access to electrs and bitcoind over LAN and not TOR. In case anyone else is wondering. Works no problem.

https://community.start9.com/t/how-to-exposing-electrs-and-bitcoind-over-lan-in-startos-0-3/754

As far as not running tor constantly, don't know yet if i can change that.

Thanks all for the replies.

I went with Start9, partly because the OS looked lower overhead and partly because the company appears to philosophically aligned with me and seems more bitcoin focused than personal home server. That said, here is what I learned:

1. It is non-trivial to use bitcoind and electrs without TOR on start9. Requires a bunch of under the hood linux stuff to enable. I actually haven't enabled it yet but it appears to be doable.
2. Start9 team seems to monitor their forums closely. I got a reply to a help post about this topic in just a few minutes. That is a big plus.
3. The start9 iso doesn't quite run on my minipc correctly. The kiosk mode doesn't work. That said, Tails linux doesn't run on that particular mini-pc either. Seems to be a video issue of some sort, but since Start9 can be installed without a keyboard and monitor, it still works. Seems pretty stable so far. Synced bitcoin and electrs in about 48 hours without a hicup. As long as I never need to hook up a monitor it is ok.
4. Seems that both products use Docker containers, however Umbrel itself runs in a container and then runs docker containers inside that. I think that in the long run, Start9 appears to have more flexibility once I learn to work with it. But the learning curve is steep.

However, I think I still might switch to umbrel. The TOR focused nature of start9 is a concern. I'm not sure i want Tor running all the time. I live in the US and Bitcoin is pretty mainstream and nobody would blink an eye at a running bitcoin node. But I think that TOR is associated with much less savory activities and I am leery that running TOR 24/7 might have my ISP suspicious.

The initial sync of the blockchain is pretty slow and uses a lot of data, so that is about the only thing keeping me from trying out Umbel for the moment.

Thanks!

So you can turn TOR off (I'm not sure how, but I can probably do it from the command line) without breaking anything? My internet is pretty fast, but I had a data cap that I just paid to get rid of, so I should be good.

If I can do that I am leaning to Start9 over Umbrel. From what I can gather on the internet, Umbrel has more layers of containerization than Start9, so will probably be more complex to troubleshoot? I guess I could go with a basic Debian server, but I'm more interested in learning about Bitcoin than Linux sys admin.

Why do you recommend Bitcoin Knots over Core? I didn't see it on the Start9 apps page, but obviously there is a way to install it as you have. I only peeked at Start9 for a hour or two so I'm sure I just missed it.

Hi All,

I've gone down the rabbit hole that started with purchasing a Ledger 2 months ago, to running Electrum on airgapped mini-pcs, then learning how keys are derived from seeds, and digging inside the psbt's just to see how they work.

Anyway, I figured I might as well go one step farther and run a bitcoin node for myself. I have installed both Start9 and Umbrel to check them out and they look pretty similar, but being as the blockchain download is HUGE, I'd like to ask for opinions on pros and cons before I choose to install the big stuff.

From what I have seen:

1. Umbrel seems to have a lot more "stuff" available, although I only want bitcoin, electrum server, mempool and maybe the lightening stuff later, so start9 seems to have what I need.
2. Umbrel seems set up to use TOR as an option, whereas Start9 seems to have TOR on by default. I don't really want TOR running all the time, and from what I read, bitcoin core doesn't use it anyway. There is probably a way to disable it in Start9 from the command line, but I wonder if that will break things.

Anyway, just from point 2, Umbrel seems better, but from those of you with experience, what do you think?

Thank you, and I hope I didn't post to the wrong section of the forum. If so, sorry.

Interestingly, I put the psbt from my testnet transaction into https://bip174.org/# and not only did it give me the input address path (ie. m/0'/0/39) but also the output address paths (m/0'/1/1 and m/0'/0/59, sending tBTC into address 59 in the same wallet). This surprises me, as I wouldn't think that would be the way it works. The partially signed transaction already has the output address, and only needs the signing wallet to look up the private key corresponding to the input, right?


Thanks for the link to those threads. Now I have some idea what is going on specifically with Electrum, in addition to what I have learned about the key generation process in general from reading the internet and ignoring the AI summaries.

Can confirm. Works exactly as described. Started electrum in offline mode, restored from seed, and signed a transaction from an address way past the first 20 addresses shown. The "Sign" button is active as soon as I load the transaction in the offline wallet, so presumably the distance from the masterkey is inside the psbt somewhere. This is really great. If I can remember the 12 word seed, I never have to have a secret wallet file existing anywhere and I can transact to my hearts content. Probably makes sense to chisel that seed on a rock and bury it in the north 40 somewhere, in case I forget it.

 Thanks for dropping the little suggesting to parse the PSBT. Looks like gibberish in there so that gives me something to figure out next! I didn't even know about "testnet" until your post yesterday, and now I've got sucked into that fiddling with all the electrum features at the low, low cost of zero. A great way to learn how bitcoin works from a users perspective.

Ah, now I get how it works. Thank you!

If i need to restore a pair of cold storage wallets from a seed, I first restore the cold wallet on the offline computer to get the master public key, then when I put that into the watching wallet, it checks the address generated until if finds 20 (if that is the gap limit) unused address. I can count these and then generate the necessary addresses in the cold wallet with the console commands.

Cool. Thank you again for your prompt and helpful replies!

Thank you hosemary!

I've never needed to recover a wallet from a seed, but let's say I lost a wallet that had used a 1000 address or more. After I restore the wallet, I need to run something like this from the electrum console:


to create 2000 more addresses before I can spend from that wallet again? Or is it better to increase the gap limit. Does one clutter up the wallet less than another? Lets say someone inherits this wallet seed. How do they know when to stop generating addresses to find the value of the wallet?

I'm sorry that this question has probably been asked a thousand times.

Thanks!

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.

Thanks everyone for the replies.

Pywallet seems to dump the private keys and associated addresses, so I should be OK. I found that they is a --dumpbalance flag, but it seems to timeout or not work on most of the addresses. Looks like there is about 100 or so addresses per file, so I could eventually enter them all into a web tool to check their balance. I don't want to download the entire 140GB blockchain file if at all possible, but that might be the easiest way.  Years ago I remember it took weeks to get the much smaller blockchain download because it was so slow through the peer to peer network.

Is there an easier way to download most of the blockchain file at once now? I have a 100MBPS internet connection and lots of space on an external drive, so I could go that way.

It is all rather stressful now that I realize that a screw up would be tens of thousands of dollars worth of mistakes.

Thanks again!

Hi All,

I acquired a few bitcoin back in 2012. I was using whatever version of the official bitcoin client was at this time. I did a lot of fiddling around with this bitcoin between different wallets, etc. Then I got busy and forgot about it for a few years.

I now realize that I should prepare to figure out how to sell this bitcoin. However it is currently might be worth A LOT of dollars (although I don't know how many bitcoin I have in these) so I don't want to screw this up.

What I have is:
1. A couple of unencrypted wallet.dat files (unencrypted by bitcoin, I've encrypted the files themselves with another app and stored them all over the place). I'm pretty sure they are intact.
2. JSON format dumps from pywallet for the file that I believe has the least (~2 BTC) bitcoin balance. I can presumably decrypt the other wallet.dat files and dump their contents with pywallet when I am confident in what I am doing.

The JSON format dump from one wallet.dat has what appears to be hundreds of addresses "addr" with associated info for "compressed", "hexsec", "private", "pubkey", "reserve", "sec" and "secret". Googling didn't really help me understand this much, but I did gather that the "sec" data is the unencrypted private key if it starts with 5.

Now I have no idea what to do to next get access to the bitcoin safely.

-Can I convert the wallet.dat file to a modern wallet file, preferably for a lightweight wallet like electrum?
-Will the newest official bitcoin wallet work read the old wallet.dat file?
-Can I import the JSON file into some sort of modern wallet file?
-Can I do any of these steps on an offline computer to ensure that if I make a screwup I can just start over?

Another concern I have is retaining access to the bitcoin cash version of these bitcoin as well as both versions from the upcoming fork.

-Will I loose access to bitcoin cash and the new forks depending on how I try to recover these old bitcoin files?

Any advice is hugely appreciated. I imagine that there are man others in the same boat as me.

Thank you so much.