ElectrumSV 1.3.8

Roger Taylor
4 min readNov 9, 2020

This article covers the release of ElectrumSV 1.3.8, and some of the more important changes that have been made since ElectrumSV 1.3.7. Skip to the “What has changed in this release?” section to see what has changed, if that is what you are here for.

Do you need an introduction to how ElectrumSV works?

We have a selected range of guides to common tasks that our users may want to do in our documentation, please check it out.

There is also a 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). This is partially replaced by the documentation guides, but still has some useful additional information.

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.

Disabled the ability to change account script type

Prevents users from setting advanced not recommended options without knowing the risks.

ElectrumSV is an open source wallet which allows users to audit the code of the features they are using themselves. It is a community project, available for free and is not monetised in any way. We make our best effort to test everything as much as we can, and our default settings are the safe options that users should stick with that are commonly used by every other ESV user.

However, one user unfortunately decided to try out an uncommon script type and it resulted in his coins being stolen. You can read more about that here:

Thanks to Dean Little for a pull request fixing our accumulator multi-signature script construction, however it is no longer possible for user’s to select that a wallet uses these and we do not have the testing infrastructure to test both valid and invalid redemption scripts, so it will remain disabled.

Issues: #1
Commits: #1 #2

The latest Trezor firmware should work with ElectrumSV

Affects Trezor users who had updated to recent firmware and wanted to use their device.

An exploit was discovered where wallet malware could direct a user to sign a transaction several times, and extract the signed spends from each and combine them into a new transaction which gave a large fee to miners. You can read more about this here:

Newer versions of the Trezor firmware required a wallet to provide all the input transactions for the transaction being signed. The reason we did not make these changes is that there are repercussions for those users who do offline signing. Offline signing wallets do not necessarily know of any transactions other than the one they are signing, and have no way to get the transactions being spent to pass into their local hardware wallet.

Users who need to do offline signing with Trezor wallets should for now stick to the earlier firmware, and older versions of ElectrumSV. We will make this work as soon as we can.

Issues: #448 #472 #509 #516 #551 #553 #554
Commits: #1 #2 #3

Other fixes

  • #539: Linux database usage would error due to differing constraints, primarily affecting transactions with over a thousand coins being spent. Thanks to Breavyn for reporting this.
  • #542: Due to the order of event processing it was possible to have transactions remaining in the Transactions tab, that should have been removed.
  • #546: Scanning QR codes would under some circumstances fail. Thanks to the unknown user of our exception reporting functionality.

What changed before this release?

You can read more details about previous bug fixes and changes, starting from the following article.

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