So I have been using Zecwallet-lite, but yeah is deprecated (I’m now trying to build the special version from @james_katz).
I still have the seed words, my question is, which wallet I should migrate to? and how to recovery my account?
Zashi seems to be very nice, but only mobile? (its planned a linux/desktop version?) that’s handy for small transactions but I don’t want to have my wallet on a mobile device… unless I keep uninstalling it all the time and only reinstall it from my seeds when I plan to use it, but could be nice to simply have a wallet working on my Linux machine.
Ywallet seems to be a liked option too, but not sure if uses the last technologies of Zcash
Zkool seems to have better updated technologies support, but cannot run at the moment because of a glibc error
Zingo-PC: for some reason it doesn’t run anything, screen stuck in black
So, what suggested wallet I should use ? and I can recover it from my seed words?
Ywallet should work if Zkool won’t (both are also on mobile). Theres also eZcash and it should derive the same addresses. Zashi and Zingo may technically be compatible but they don’t allow you to generate multiple addresses like zecwallet lite did and so you may not be able to rwcover all the funds on those wallets. There is also a recovery tool by the Ywallet dev that you could try as well.
I see that for the recovery there’s a “birth height”, what it is or how I can know which value I should use?
On the other hand seems like I was able to use github to build a binary of the zecwallet-lite updates by James, it should be maybe easier if I just use this one and transfer the funds?
It is the block height at the time you created the wallet. If you do not remember or did not save that height, you could remember the date and thus estimate a block height around that date.
If you have no idea, choose 0. That incurs a full scan and the scan time difference for blocks before 1.7M is neglegable.
You can try building that version which is the latest butld but there were reports of issues recently. Inside of that repo is zecwallet lite cli (right? lemme look) and historically has been more useful than the Gui version. It’s a little tricky to use but way easier than zcashd.
Like I said, zingo should be technically compatible but it doesn’t let the user generate the extra addresses like zwl did and any funds in those won’t be recovered.
This is the cli version
(Zingo is a fork of zwl and has a cli just like this which also works great)
Opening the “deprecated” zecwallet-lite I can see the first transaction was received on 5 august 2021 at 5:53 pm but this will be of course a date somewhat later of the creation of the wallet.
Hum! That sounds confusing and complex.
So the best option would be to create a new wallet with maybe zashi and trasfer all the funds if I can open zecwallet-lite with the version zecwallet-lite-nu6 ? I did a few commits in my fork of the nu6 mostly about disabling things in order to let github build a binary which seemed like to be successful: do not sign binaries · Thanatermesis/zecwallet-lite-nu6@c1c50c2 · GitHub I didn’t tried it yet
Yep! It’s been terrible and Ywallet was basically the only wallet that supported zwl recovery for a while. If you can recover your addresses with the latest zecwallet light, then you may be able to send out of the wallet to another, like zashi. If not, then there are the recovery tools, Ywallet and Zkool on mobile at least (its still way faster than zwl on desktop).
Yes, that’s the best thing to do. Create a new wallet and transfer what you have in the old one.
If you open that old transaction, you can use the TXID to look it up in the block explorer and find the block height, which may be close to the birthday.
Also like mentioned, you could try eZcash. Its account system is similar to zwl and some people really like the ux. It also runs on everything. You can import your seed and attempt to generate the same address set as in zecwallet light. If you can, then you’d just rescan and should be g2g.
Another thing: If the funds are in Sapling or transparent addresses, then zwl will allow you to export those private keys and you can import them into Ywallet/Zkool on the account creation screen, rescan and yourr good, easy-peasy. The Orchard addresses dont have keys. The default one is easy to get with the seed. It’s those extra ones that are troublesome.
Is ywallet not compatible with zingo, and neither is zingo compatible with ywallet? Is Zashi compatible with Zingo? How do these compatibilities work? Are the seed phrases different?
I’d like to understand more about wallet compatibility, whether the seed phrase can be recovered on any Waller, or whether one wallet is more compatible than another. Which wallets can I trust? Which wallet won’t leave me in trouble when I need to transfer coins the most.
All of the wallets you listed are compatible with each other. You’ll get the same addresses for the same seed. Ywallet is a multi account wallet but separates the accounts by the seed.
Zecwallet light will also give you the same initial 3 transparent, sapling and orchard addresses. But, the way it generated extra addresses is not considered best-practice anymore largely because of the confusion it causes and so none of the wallets you listed are “Fully” compatible as they do not generate the extra addresses as a normal function, in the same way. They are “Partially” compatible because they will derive the same 3 initial addresses. Many users created and used extra addresses so partial compatibility is often not enough.
As long as you back up the seed properly, you should always be able to recover. Zkool, Zashi, Ywallet, eZcash and Zingo are good lightwallets. There are a few others as well you can search for here on forum.
So I don’t need to worry about being tied to a single wallet? Can I have Ywallet, Zingo, Zashi… recover the wallet with the seed and use my preferred wallet, being able to change wallets whenever I want. Create the seed in Ywallet and move the funds in Zingo using the same seed generated in Ywallet and so on? Does Keystone also generate a seed compatible with all wallets or in this case is the Keystone seed different because it is a hardware wallet? Does compatibility also apply to the Keystone hardware wallet?
Correct, you can have all the wallets and decide which one(s) you like. At one time, some of these apps were a little heavy but nowadays their caches are tiny and its nothing to have them all installed. Because of their slight differences and problems we’ve had in the past, it’s often a good idea to just take a note of what wallet the seed originally came from, along with the birthday, so you can know about any extra steps you might need to take to recover later down the road.
If you choose to use multiple wallets regularly, then it is advised that you have different seeds for them all. One reason for that is because (historically, anyways) one wallet may not immediately detect another (clone) wallet spending funds that itself also posesses and it can cause the wallet to display an innacurate balance until it is rescanned. It’s not a major issue but can catch users by surprise and cause small headaches if they didn’t know beforehand that could happen.
Another reason is “change” addresses. Nowadays pretty much about standard but at one time not too terribly long ago at all, importing a seed from one wallet into another might show a balance that is short because the wallet before generated and used a dfferent address for returning change from transactions. This was slightly bigger issue, couldn’t just recan to fix, lessons learned (Like the zecwallet light address generation thing; it was misleading and bad and yeah that way of doing it is pretty much gone).
I’ll defer the Keystone question to ECC, just for accuracy.
but could be nice to simply have a wallet working on my Linux machine.