Tue Nov 17, 2015 3:11 pm

Did electrum invent HD Wallets? It was the first HD Wallet I know.

Can you comment on some of the security / privacy problems with HD wallets?

I have the feeling the newer versions of electrum are a bit slower than the older. But maybe it relates to the daily micro-transactions from cloud-mining. What do you think?

Electrum has a infrastructure for plugins, but I heard it is very complicated. Are there plans to make it easier for developers? And what plugin do you think is the best?

Do you have plans to integrate some privacy-enhancing features like coinshuffle?

Ist the number of electrum-servers also decreasing like bitcoin-clients? Are there some incentives for people to run an electrum server?

I guess what you mean is deterministic wallets. HD simply means "hierarchical deterministic", but few wallets use the hierarchical aspect of it.No, Electrum did not invent deterministic wallets. Electrum was not even the first deterministic wallet. (BitcoinSpinner existed before Electrum)I believe Gregory Maxwell is the one who invented deterministic wallets, or at least the idea of having a separation between public and private derivations (he called this 'type 2' deterministic wallets).Electrum was the first wallet to use the concepts developed by Greg Maxwell. This idea has been used in HD wallets and BIP32. Electrum was also the first wallet to come with a seed phrase (sequence of English words) that allows you to restore your wallet (later used in BIP39).These issues are well known.In terms of security, you must not leak any of your private keys; leaking a single of them, plus your master public key, will compromise your entire wallet. (even the private keys that you will derive in the future). In terms of privacy, the privacy of your wallet is the privacy of your master public key.My opinion is that these problems are real, but not as big as the problem of users repeatedly losing their bitcoins because they are not able to do proper backups, which is the situation you have without deterministic wallets.Newer version are actually faster. However, if your wallet is old, it may contain a lot of addresses, which slows down the synchronization. If that is the case, I suggest to create a new wallet every year or so.The most popular Electrum plugin is probably the LabelSync plugin. Plugins used to be simpler in the past. I am planning to modify the plugin architecture, in order to handle various GUIs. I hope that this will also make them easier to write.Not for the moment. My understanding is that this might be considered as money laundering in some regulations, and that promoting this could jeopardize the entire project. I might change my position if there is some clarification of the legal situation.The number of Electrum servers has been increasing recently, because the code has become more efficient and easier to run.We now have about 40 Electrum servers simultaneously active at any moment. I will have a party when/if we reach 1% of the Bitcoin network. (that should be 65 servers)The people who run Electrum servers get donations, and some visibility. These are the main incentives at the moment. Maybe in the future we will also see some commercial Electrum servers, for businesses with heavy needs (currently Electrum servers have anti DOS measures in their default setup, that prevent users from querying Electrum servers for large scale operations)