Electrum, the popular hybrid online/offline wallet, has released v2.0. It brings a host of highly requested and anticipated features, along with a few features you probably never knew you wanted.

The update unsurprisingly focuses on security. They have added multi-signature functionality using parallel BIP32 derivations, and 2FA support using the Google Authenticator and TrustedCoin services (wallets can be restored by seed if TrustedCoin ever shuts down). Support for popular hardware wallets Trezor and Btchip have also been added.

A few changes have been made to the GUI, including making invoices much more user friendly. Invoices make it easier for companies to accept bitcoin by sending payment requests to customers.

These are all very useful and critical features, but Electrum v2 also boasts a really cool, although not all that useful, feature: sending transactions using sound. Data has been getting transferred through sound for as long as there has been data to transfer, so its usage for bitcoin was only a matter of time. Bitcoin sound transactions were proven as a concept by Kyrptoradio last year. More information about audio modem technology can be found on this GitHub.

The idea is to find a way to send the data through the air in a manner that is more secure than using bluetooth. Bluetooth stacks can easily be fixed, so sending a transaction through sound is thought to be more secure.

Electrum’s Android version was also updated, and is reportedly more stable than previous versions. It still requires an unconventional installation process, so things aren't as easy as they need to be yet.

Electrum v2 has been released for Android, Windows, OSX and Linux. There are some known issues when upgrading from v1, instructions on how to do so safely can be found here.

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