Electrum wallet setup for better privacy

Electrum is a Bitcoin wallet that's been around since 2011 and has more privacy configuration options than most mobile wallets. If you're using Bitcoin for payments and care about reducing your on-chain exposure, here's what to configure.

Why Electrum over other options

Electrum supports connecting to your own Bitcoin node or a specific Electrum server rather than defaulting to random public servers. When you query the Bitcoin network for your balance and transaction history, that query is visible to the server you connect to. Using a server you control or a trusted public server reduces the number of parties that can correlate your queries with your IP address.

Electrum also supports Tor routing natively — you can configure it to route all network traffic through Tor so your IP address isn't visible to the Electrum server you connect to.

Basic privacy setup steps

First, download Electrum only from electrum.org — there are multiple fake versions distributed through ad networks and unofficial sites. Verify the signature on the download before installing.

After installation, go to Tools → Network and configure a specific server rather than using random server selection. If you have Tor running locally, enable proxy settings to route through localhost port 9050 (the default Tor proxy port).

For wallet creation, use a new seed phrase generated within Electrum rather than importing one from elsewhere. Generate and store the seed phrase on paper — not digitally.

Address reuse

Electrum generates a new receiving address for each transaction automatically. Use this behavior — don't manually reuse addresses. Address reuse links your transactions together in ways that make on-chain analysis trivial.

For maximum privacy, Electrum is still a Bitcoin wallet with Bitcoin's transparency properties. Even with these configurations, Monero provides meaningfully stronger privacy guarantees for sensitive payments. Electrum is appropriate when you need to use Bitcoin specifically and want to reduce the metadata exposure around those transactions.