Electrum 101 part 2: How to find your private keys to extract Bitcoin Cash (for tech dummies)

I am writing this as I teach myself how to extract the new alt coin Bitcoin Cash (BCC or BCH) from an Electrum Wallet. I deposited and held some bitcoin in this wallet BEFORE the fork. You cannot retrieve BCC if you deposited AFTER the fork happened on August 1st . This tutorial explains how to extract private keys from the Electrum Wallet, specifically for extracting BCC from the Coinomi Wallet app for android devices.

FIRST THING VERY IMPORTANT! Empty your wallet!! I put my coins back on my favorite trading platform Paxful. After that task of emptying your wallet is completed, please follow these steps.

INSTRUCTIONS :

• Open your Electrum wallet: the main menu looks like THIS
• FIND your addresses: Click the “ADDRESSES” tab from the top of your electrum wallet menu bar. It will look like THIS.

PLEASE NOTE: the tiny drop down arrows are easy to miss. You will see the drop down arrows under “RECEIVE”, “USED”, and “CHANGE”.

• Click the dropdown arrow under “change" , which will reveal the_“used”_ tab, and click on that arrow to see your used wallet addresses. It looks like THIS.

Please note it says number of transactions for each address on the far right under “tx” tab.

I had 6 different addresses, each with 2 transactions. 3 were deposits before the fork, and 2 were withdrawals AFTER the fork. Please remember you can only extract BCC if you made deposits BEFORE the fork.

FIND YOUR PRIVATE KEYS:

• You can RIGHT CLICK on an address to find a lot of information. It looks like THIS.
• Then select “Private Keys” to reveal your private key for a specific address. BE CAREFUL!! Do not share this Private Key with anyone.

I had three keys I used to extract my BCC. They were my 3 deposits BEFORE the Fork. It was not obvious to me to find which keys I used. I had to determine which addresses were used for these 3 deposits, I did that by right clicking the addresses , and selecting “History”.

I temporarily copy and pasted my private keys to a secure place until I extracted my BCC, and then deleted them as a security precaution. BE CAREFUL. Respect your Private Keys !! Do not give them out, and do not leave them in a vulnerable place to be stolen. The keys are just another long string of letters and numbers that look similar to your wallet addresses. Don’t get confused like I easily do.

Now I have my Private Keys, what do I do with them to extract Bitcoin Cash?

See the short blog on Extract BCC from Electrum using Coinomi Android App

Updated 8–3–2017 -kareninsf and consultation by Snowkeld