The Electrum ABC eCash wallet contains the CashFusion feature. CashFusion provides basic opt-in anonymity for regular eCash (XEC) users. For example, if someone is paid in XEC, then goes to make a retail purchase, they may not want the retailer to be able to trivially see their salary payments. It’s also important for businesses using eCash for payments, as they may not want their competitors to easily see all of their transactions with suppliers and customers.
The way CashFusion works is to automatically create transactions with other users of the protocol which combine many inputs and outputs from the different participating wallets. In this way, it becomes difficult or impossible to know which coins (outputs) correspond to the different inputs.
Some users of CashFusion like to leave it running continuously in order to keep a fresh supply of Fused coins, and also help provide liquidity to other CashFusion wallets on the network. In the past, this would typically mean running the Electrum ABC GUI application on your desktop computer, and just leaving the application going. But this is inconvenient and unreliable. With the recent releases of Electrum ABC, it becomes possible to run Electrum ABC with CashFusion on daemon mode, making it convenient to leave it “always on”, and easy to run on a remote server.
Getting Electrum ABC up and running
You will be using the “AppImage” executable file to run Electrum ABC on a Linux terminal. This could either be on a remote server, or on your local machine. The first step is to download the Electrum ABC application in your Linux terminal. The examples in this article use Electrum ABC 5.1.6, but it is recommended to use the most recent release. Simply edit the version numbers in the examples as needed.
wget https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/ElectrumABC/releases/download/5.1.6/ElectrumABC-5.1.6-x86_64.AppImage
chmod +x ElectrumABC-5.1.6-x86_64.AppImage
If you are unable to run AppImage, it may be because you are missing the “Filesystem in User Space” (FUSE) library. This is the case with Debian and Ubuntu. To fix this, run the following commands:
sudo apt-get install fuse libfuse2
sudo modprobe -v fuse
sudo addgroup fuse
sudo adduser $USER fuse
As of Electrum ABC version 5.2.3, tor is no longer bundled with the release binary files. CashFusion requires tor to operate, so install it before starting the Electrum ABC daemon:
sudo apt-get install tor
Now it’s time to get the Electrum ABC daemon running, create a new wallet (save the seed), load it, generate addresses, and send funds to the addresses.
./ElectrumABC-5.1.6-x86_64.AppImage daemon start
./ElectrumABC-5.1.6-x86_64.AppImage create
./ElectrumABC-5.1.6-x86_64.AppImage load_wallet
./ElectrumABC-5.1.6-x86_64.AppImage listaddresses --receiving --unused
The listaddresses command will generate a list of fresh addresses suitable for sending coins to.
Starting with 5 to 10 coins of different amounts is recommended for CashFusion.
If you have a pre-existing wallet, it can be added with the following command (change the wallet path and name as needed):
./ElectrumABC-5.1.6-x86_64.AppImage -w ~/.electrum-abc/wallets/default_wallet load_wallet
There are also help commands which provide lists of other commands available to Electrum ABC in daemon mode. Two useful help commands are:
./ElectrumABC-5.1.6-x86_64.AppImage help
./ElectrumABC-5.1.6-x86_64.AppImage daemon --help
Enabling CashFusion
Next you will enable “autofuse”. This tells the wallet to start automatically participating in CashFusion rounds as soon as the coins are confirmed.
./ElectrumABC-5.1.6-x86_64.AppImage daemon enable_autofuse
If the wallet is password protected, specify the password as an extra argument after enable_autofuse:
./ElectrumABC-5.1.6-x86_64.AppImage daemon enable_autofuse "my_password"
You are now running CashFusion!
The status of the CashFusion can be checked with this command:
./ElectrumABC-5.1.6-x86_64.AppImage daemon fusion_status
When you want to stop CashFusion, you can stop the daemon with:
./ElectrumABC-5.1.6-x86_64.AppImage daemon stop
Happy Fusing!
Congratulations, you are now able to run Electrum ABC as a command line daemon, and run CashFusion in this mode. This daemon can be left running for extended periods of time to keep your wallet with a fresh supply of fused coins, and provide liquidity for other CashFusion users on the network.