ElectrumSV 1.2.2
By: Roger Taylor
Tags: Bitcoin Sv, Electrumsv, Bitcoin Wallet, Bitcoin

These are the changes that are coming in ElectrumSV 1.2.2, there’s nothing particularly important, but I think sooner is better with regard to helping users avoid coin loss, so we’re going to make it happen.

Updates

These are the updates made to this article since it was first published:

2019/07/10 — History list icon changes.

2019/07/10 — Balance breakdown.

2019/07/19 — Windows Keepkey warning.

Block explorers

When Bitcoin Cash ABC split off from Bitcoin SV, there weren’t any block explorers and members of the community set up their own. As time passed, the time and energy to maintain them lessened, and they became unusable. So we’ve removed the ones that no longer work.

Perhaps you may not know that you can select a transaction and view it on a block explorer.

View the selected transaction on a block explorer.

Or you can select an address and view it on a block explorer.

View the selected address on a block explorer.

You can specify your preferred block explorer in your preferences, in the General tab. And if you haven’t chosen one, it’ll pick a random one each time for you.

Setting the block explorer to use.

We’ve also added the testnet and scaling testnet explorers from both WhatsOnChain.com and Satoshi.io.

Exchange rates and unprofessional Kraken

By configuring your fiat preferences, you can see your balance in one of the fiat currencies we have support for. We’ve removed Kraken, who have made some extremely strange decision to delist BSV that seemed to based on outrage that Craig Wright would defend himself against slander, harassment and libel? As far as I can tell, because Craig wouldn’t just be bullied, Kraken dropped BSV in a very shadey looking way.

Exchange rates are useful, and we need them from professional exchanges that aren’t more interested in supporting internet harassment. So we had to remove Kraken.

Here fiat exhange rates are configured to USD from some exchange.

Here you can see the USD values for the BSV balance in the status bar at the bottom of the window.

Screenshot of fiat values enabled.

Thanks to all the exchanges and services that provide fiat exchange rates, we appreciate it, and I am sure our users do too!

Coin loss education

I hear every other day about people sending coins and losing them. Some people don’t know about coin-splitting and just blindly click and send, and live to regret it. Some do know, but don’t know how it works, so just click to split once and forget about it and assume the coin fairy will take care of their coins. Some just send large amounts with little consideration for whether it’s a good idea, coin-splitting or not.And so on. It’s so bad our friends from over at Electron Cash came over and said something paraphrased as, “our users don’t really know this coin-splitting stuff either, can you do something to help them better understand it and help both of us out.”

It’s time for us to do something about all of these things. This probably won’t be the long term solution, but the least we can do now given the large amount of time and work better and more comprehensive solutions would require. The least we can do is point out to people that they are taking a risk, and the basic things they should be considering before doing so.

We show the warning in the release notes message that appears on first starting a new version of ElectrumSV.

The release notes dialog.

And we show the warning when the user goes to send money.

The send warning dialog.

Now users have an opportunity to help themselves understand the repercussions of sending BSV. I hope we hear a lot less cases of people taking risks and paying the price by losing their coins. If you want to see the article we link to, check it out here: Avoiding coin loss.

Coin-splitting warning

We’ve added a clear message about the dangers of splitting your coins and assuming that any further use of the wallet means all coins within it (even if they arrive later) are forever magically split already.

You might think that people may not read it because it is now very wordy, but that’s not our problem. At the end of the day if people aren’t going to heed the warnings, then it’s their own money they’re risking. All we have to do, is do our reasonable best.

New message added to the coin-splitting dialog.

False claims from virus and malware checkers

We’re based on pyinstaller, which is also used by malware. This leads to some false positives for our software, but we also likely get outraged anti-BSV people expressing their mental illness through false reports. These people are all over Twitter making the world a worse place.

With the aid of Remy, these problems have been pretty much solved, and we’ve not had any reports of virus/malware checker interference.

History list icon changes

At the wallet workshop, Lin Zheming pointed out that what Electrum calls “unmatured” transactions, appear the same as confirmed ones in the history list. As confirmed coins can be freely spent, and unmatured coins cannot, this is unhelpful.

Unmatured coins are the block reward for miners. The block reward is the mining subsidy and the fees from the transactions mined in their block. The miner creates a coinbase transaction as the first transaction in the block, and this can send in it’s outputs the block reward. However, these special coinbase outputs cannot be spent until the block has 100 confirmations. And until this has occurred, these outputs are considered “unmatured”.

Additionally, while addressing this we decided to remove the display of the six confirmations. Now there are only three states, unconfirmed, unmatured and confirmed.

We now only show three straightforward icon states.

As seen in the screenshot, unconfirmed transactions are displayed with the grey tick to indicate 0-conf status. Unmatured transactions are displayed with a lock in order to indicate unspendability. And confirmed transactions get a green tick to indicate spendability.

Balance breakdown

When we forked from Electron Cash, we used to just display balances for all three types of coins in the status bar. It was messy and confusing, so we just switched to displaying the confirmed balance (and of course it’s fiat value if you enabled that in the preferences).

However, it isn’t clear that is what the balance is, so people tend to assume the balance is whatever they want it to be. At a later stage we may let people specify in the preferences what is included in the displayed balance (whether that be all coins, just the spendable ones or just the confirmed ones), but for now we’ve added a breakdown that shows the different balances.

The user can verify that unconfirmed and unmatured coins are not included, by looking at this.

Use the balance breakdown to get a clearer idea of what the balance is and see the other balances.

Various bug fixes

The network dialog: If you toggled the “Select server automatically” setting, it would break and things would error. I don’t remember much more, but if you experienced this, it’s safe to use again.

Where you can choose to connect to a specific server, or connect to any one automatically.

The network dialog: If you were connected to servers and a chain split was detected, each split is given a name indicating the block height each server split. The code would error if there were any splits, when determining what name to use for each.

Where you can see the servers you are connected to and the chain splits, if any.

MacOS executable: libusb was not bundled with the executable, which meant to get hardware wallets working, depending on the situation the user might have needed to install libusb. With this release we rectify that, and this shouldn’t be something MacOS users need worry about.

Problems and warnings

The Keepkey hardware wallet and a problematic Windows update

Windows 10 build 1903 changes how USB works, and this is reflected in the Keepkey hardware wallet being reported not to work.

If you experience this, you may either need to wait for Microsoft to fix the problem, Keepkey to fix the problem so we can do another release or run ElectrumSV as administrator to give it permissions to access USB.