Electrum is a popular bitcoin wallet that features a simple, lightweight interface. Wallet, found online at Electrum.org, has been a popular bitcoin wallet since launching in November 2011 by German computer scientist Thomas Voegtlin. The encrypted wallet protects your bitcoins behind a password and features surprisingly simple code, written in Python. That code is available open source to the public.

Today, you can download wallet for a wide range of platforms. It’s available for free for

• Linux
• Windows
• Mac OS X
• Android.

You can download it from the Google Play Store for Android, or visit website Electrum.org to download easy installation executables for all other versions.

Security

Platform is considered one of the most secure bitcoin wallets available today, and that’s largely due to the encryption techniques it uses to secure your private keys.

Wallet also has a highly secure seed, which is the random phrase that is used to generate your private keys. Without getting overly technical, the Electrum seed provides essentially the same level of security as a bitcoin private key.

Your seed is extremely important, as it is the only way you can recover your password if you forget it. As mentioned earlier, the password you initiate when you open the Electrum wallet is needed to send bitcoin payments.

Fees

As a service provider, Electrum charges transaction fees for sending bitcoin. The default fee is a flat rate of 0.2 mBTC (millibitcoin). This rate can be reduced to 0.1 mBTC , or even lower in some cases.

The transaction fee is included in the sum of the amount you want to send. The Electrum platform will issue a warning if the total transaction amount exceeds your wallet balance.

At present, platform only supports bitcoin.