ElectrumSV 1.3.6
This article covers the release of ElectrumSV 1.3.6, and some of the more important changes that have been made since ElectrumSV 1.3.5.
Do you need an introduction to how ElectrumSV works?
Perhaps you might be better served just heading over to our guide that illustrates some of the common uses of ElectrumSV. Especially if you are new to ElectrumSV, or coming from ElectrumSV 1.2.5 (or even earlier versions).
Where can you download ElectrumSV?
The only safe downloads are available on: electrumsv.io
Where can you get help?
Find our issue tracker here where you can create a ticket. Fill out the issue template, please! Otherwise we have no idea what steps you took or any of the other details and then we have to spend time asking you them anyway and you get help much later. Fill out the template for your own sake, if not ours!
We do not provide support over Twitter or any other forms of social media. Not only is it not guaranteed we will see your comments, it is a very painful way to do support that we avoid. If you need support, submit an issue on our issue tracker. Or you can raise subjects of interest on Unwriter’s Slack, or the Metanet.ICU Slack.
If you are a MacOS user and cannot install/run our latest release, please read this article.
What has changed in this release?
The main fixes in this release have been listed below. If you don’t want to know the details, just read the titles. If you want to find out about smaller fixes, you can check the release notes in the Github repository.
An update to coin-splitting support
Affects people who want to unlink their coins from Bitcoin Cash
The approach that we have used for coin-splitting in the past, is by requesting a tiny amount of Bitcoin SV (BSV) from an faucet is provided as a service to the community for this purpose. Then this is combined with all the available coins in the account (but not those that are frozen or immature) and sent back into the account. The combination with the tiny piece of BSV from the faucet makes all the other coins now BSV only also. This is a little clumsy and it relies on the faucet being funded to work. And it has other limitations like rate limiting that limits use — which is painful for those with multiple wallets to split. Let’s call this the “Faucet Split.”
The new approach adds a small piece of meaningless encrypted data with the coins that are being split, in a way that is not compatible with Bitcoin Cash. This replaces the tiny piece of BSV obtained from the faucet in the “Faucet Split” approach. It no longer relies on the faucet, and has no rate limiting in how often it can be done. Let’s call this the “Direct Split.”
The “Direct Split” approach will not work with hardware wallets. Hardware wallets are very limited devices that contain arbitrary restrictions, and their vendors do not provide any support to ElectrumSV for their ongoing use. They will refuse to sign a transaction with this extra data in it. All they can really do is sign simple payments, what are known is P2PKH (pay to public key hash). As time passes these devices are breaking more and more, some with bad firmware releases if not intentional decisions to stop working with certain derivation paths.
We have not supported splitting multi-signature accounts until now, not because it can’t be done with the “Faucet Split” approach, but rather that we had limited the scope of the work. The “Direct Split” approach now does support multi-signature splitting.
Broken QR code sourced payment requests
Affects those who pick up their laptop and hold the camera to a QR code?
A number of parties tried out the BIP270 payment request support successfully, some reporting minor problems that were fixed along the way (Anypay, Centi and PayPresto). But along the way, the less commonly used approach to importing an invoice by scanning a QR code with the computer’s camera was broken.
For a desktop computer, the most direct way to import an invoice through a payment request is to click the “Copy” button and have the URL copied to the clipboard. This is then pasted into ElectrumSV’s “Pay to” field, and the process moves forward.
However, if a user scanned a QR code it would import the invoice twice, and the second import would conflict with the first and result in a broken state.
What changed before this release?
You can read more detail about bug fixes and changes, included in these.
