How can I recover bitcoins sent to derived addresses in Electrum?

Question

I am using the Electrum wallet. Recently, I used my Public master key on the Mycelium Gear site to create a widget. This widget generates Bitcoin addresses, which I want to manage with my Electrum wallet. I received some bitcoins to these generated addresses but I cannot see the generated address in my Electrum wallet! I also cannot see my generated address in Xpub blockchain.info.

I already have my generated Bitcoin addresses, so now I need private keys for them. When I used the command to get the private key I received this error:

wallet.get_master_private_key('x/', gui.password_dialog())
Traceback (most recent call last):
NameError: name 'gui' is not defined

Answer 1

Electrum and Mycelium Gear both use BIP32 for address derivation from a master seed, but Electrum is not BIP39 compatible. Thus you need to take the master seed (BIP32 Extended Key, iirc) and restore it in a new Electrum wallet, and that should work.

Alternatively, if you want to get individual address private keys you can use http://bip32.org - my suggestion is to use the "Download ZIP" function at the bottom right of the page, and work with the keys offline, otherwise there is a chance that compromised code could expose your private keys.

Answer 2

I made a tool for deriving bip32 private keys and related info. Might be helpful for somebody in similar situation. The tool is hd-wallet-derive.

Answer 3

alternatively, you can try this: http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/merchant.html