Welcome to ElectrumSV’s documentation!
ElectrumSV is a wallet application for Bitcoin SV, a peer to peer form of electronic cash. As a wallet application it allows you to track, receive and spend bitcoin whenever you need to. But that’s just the basics, as it manages and secures your keys it also helps you to do many other things.
Important
ElectrumSV can only be downloaded from electrumsv.io.
Getting started
Before you can send and receive payments, you need to first create a wallet, and then create at least one account within it.
- How do you know you have the official software and not malware?
Every person who had their coins stolen and was interested in investigating, identified that they had not downloaded from our official web site, and had instead obtained malware from some other fake site. Many swore they downloaded from the official site until their verified their download and found it to be malware. Read more about verifying your download.
- How do you create a wallet?
Your wallet is a standalone container for all your bitcoin-related data. You should be able to create as many accounts as you need within it, each account containing separated funds much like a bank account. Read more about creating a wallet.
- How do you create an account?
Each account in your wallet is much like a bank account, with the funds in each separated from the others. Read more about creating an account.
- How do you receive a payment from someone else?
Each account has the ability to provide countless unique and private receiving addresses and by giving a different one of these out to each person who will send you coins, allows you to receive funds from them. Read more about receiving a payment.
- How do you make a payment to someone else?
By obtaining an address from another person, if you have coins in one of your accounts, you should be able to send some or all of those coins to that address. Read more about making a payment.
Problem solving
- Why doesn’t my hardware wallet work?
Hardware wallet makers do not provide anywhere near enough support for their devices, and some have a history of making breaking changes that stop them working in ElectrumSV. If your hardware wallet does not work then this is where you should look for some pointers, whether the device is a Trezor, a Ledger, a Keepkey or a Bitbox. Read more about hardware wallet issues.
- How do I split my coins?
If you have coins you have not touched since before Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin Cash split from each other, you might want to make sure that you can send one of these without accidentally sending the other. Read more about coin splitting.
Building on ElectrumSV
- How can I access my wallet using the REST API?
For most users, accessing their wallet with the user interface will be fine. But if you have a minimal amount of development skill the availability of the REST API gives you a lot more flexibility. The REST API allows a variety of actions among them loading multiple wallets, accessing different accounts, obtaining payment destinations or scripts from any of the accounts. Perhaps you want to add your own interface for your wallet or maybe automate how you use it. Read more about the REST API.
- How would I extend ElectrumSV as a customised wallet server?
The REST API is limited in what it can do by nature. Getting the ElectrumSV development team to add what you want to it, is not guaranteed to happen, may not even be possible and if it was who knows how long it would take. An alternative is to build your own “daemon application” which is a way of extending ElectrumSV from the inside. Read more about customised wallet servers.
- Do I have to develop against the existing public blockchains?
ElectrumSV provides a way for developers to do offline or local development. customised wallet servers.
The ElectrumSV project
Perhaps you are a developer who already helps out on the ElectrumSV project, or you who would like to get involved in some way, or you are just curious about the processes and information related to project management and development. If so, this is the information you want.
- How can you contribute?
There are many ways that you can help the ElectrumSV project improve. If you want something to work in a different way, you can work on making it different and offer us the changes. If you feel the documentation could be better, you can improve it and offer us the changes. If you want ElectrumSV or anything related to it in your native language, you can offer to do the work to translate it. And that’s just a few of the possibilities. Read more about contributing.
- Where is the continuous integration and how is it used?
We use Microsoft’s Azure DevOps services for continuous integration. Microsoft provide generous levels of free usage to open source projects hosted on Github. This is used to do a range of activities for every change we make to the source code, from running the unit tests against each change on each supported operating system, to creating a packaged release for each system that can be manually tested. Read more about our use of continuous integration.
- What is the process of releasing a new version?
Because we generate packaged releases for every change we make, with a bit of extra work we can generate properly prepared public releases. This involves changing the source code so that the release has the content changes required for new version, and also publishing the release and updating the web site to have the content changes required to offer it for download. Read more about the release process.