Electrum USDT is fully compatible with Windows, macOS, and Linux, supporting a broad range of Unix-based systems. It’s thoroughly tested on macOS and DragonFlyBSD, and community contributions are always welcome to further enhance cross-platform performance!

Package	Description
Python 3.6+	The core environment for running Electrum USDT.
PyQt5	Required for the graphical user interface (GUI).
pip	Python package installer, used to install dependencies.

To install Electrum USDT, follow these steps:

1. Ensure you have Python 3.6+ installed on your system. You can verify your Python version by running the command:
   

   python3 --version

2. Install the necessary dependencies for Electrum USDT using pip. Run the following commands:
   

   pip3 install pyqt5

   pip3 install -r requirements.txt

3. Clone the Electrum USDT repository from GitHub:

   git clone https://github.com/Electrum-Tether/electrum-usdt/tree/master/docs

4. Navigate to the directory where Electrum USDT was cloned:
   

   cd electrum-usdt

5. Once inside the directory, you can launch Electrum USDT using the following command:
   

   python3 run_electrum

You should now see the Electrum USDT interface. From here, you can set up your wallet or import an existing one.

If you'd like to run your own Electrum USDT server, follow these additional steps:

1. Make sure you have a Bitcoin node running and fully synchronized.
2. Download the Electrum USDT server software from the official repository:

   git clone https://github.com/Electrum-Tether/electrum-usdt.git

3. Install the necessary dependencies for Electrum USDT:

   pip3 install -r requirements.txt

4. Configure your server settings in the electrum-usdt.conf file. Ensure you set the correct RPC credentials and point to your Bitcoin node.
5. Start the server by running:

   python3 electrum-usdt_server

6. Verify the server is running and listening on the correct port by checking the status or using the following command:

   netstat -plnt | grep :50002

Your Electrum USDT server should now be running and ready to serve your wallet or others.

Creating the symlink will kick off the server process almost immediately. You can see its logs with:

tail -F /path/to/log/dir/current | tai64nlocal

This repository contains a sample systemd unit file that you can use to setup Electrum USDT with systemd. Simply copy it to /etc/systemd/system:

cp contrib/systemd/electrum-usdt.service /etc/systemd/system/

The sample unit file assumes that the repository is located at /home/electrum-usdt/electrum-usdt. If that differs on your system, you need to change the unit file accordingly.

You need to set a few environment variables in /etc/electrum-usdt.conf.

Now you can start Electrum USDT using systemctl:

systemctl start electrum-usdt

You can use journalctl to check the log output:

journalctl -u electrum-usdt -f

Once configured you may want to start Electrum USDT at boot:

systemctl enable electrum-usdt

To install on the Raspberry Pi 3 you will need to update to the stretch distribution. See the full procedure in contrib/raspberrypi3/install_electrum-usdt.sh.

See also contrib/raspberrypi3/run_electrum-usdt.sh for an easy way to configure and launch Electrum USDT.

Time taken to index the blockchain depends on your hardware of course. As Python is single-threaded most of the time only 1 core is kept busy. Electrum USDT uses Python's asyncio to prefill a cache of future blocks asynchronously to keep the CPU busy processing the chain without pausing.

Consequently there will probably be only a minor boost in performance if the daemon is on the same host. It may even be beneficial to have the daemon on a separate machine so the machine doing the indexing has its caches and disk I/O tuned to that task only.

The CACHE_MB environment variable controls the total cache size Electrum USDT uses; see here for caveats.

Here is my experience with the codebase of early 2017 (the current codebase is faster), to given heights and rough wall-time. The period from heights 363,000 to 378,000 is the most sluggish:

		 Machine A      Machine B
181,000          25m 00s      5m 30s
283,500                       1h 00m
321,800                       1h 40m
357,000          12h 32m      2h 41m
386,000          21h 56m      4h 25m
414,200       1d 12h 29m      6h 30m
447,168       2d 13h 20m      9h 47m
					 

Machine A: a low-spec 2011 1.6GHz AMD E-350 dual-core fanless CPU, 8GB RAM and a DragonFlyBSD UFS filesystem on an SSD. It requests blocks over the LAN from a bitcoind on machine B. DB_CACHE the default of 1,200. LevelDB.

Machine B: a late 2012 iMac running Sierra 10.12.2, 2.9GHz quad-core Intel i5 CPU with an HDD and 24GB RAM. Running bitcoind on the same machine. DB_CACHE set to 1,800. LevelDB.

For chains other than bitcoin-mainnet synchronization should be much faster.

The preferred way to terminate the server process is to send it the stop RPC command:

electrum-usdt_rpc stop

or alternatively on Unix the INT or TERM signals. For a daemontools supervised process this can be done by bringing it down like so:

svc -d ~/service/electrum-usdt

Electrum USDT will note receipt of the signals in the logs, and ensure the block chain index is flushed to disk before terminating. You should be patient as flushing data to disk can take many minutes.

Electrum USDT uses the transaction functionality, with fsync enabled, of the databases. I have written it with the intent that, to the extent the atomicity guarantees are upheld by the DB software, the operating system, and the hardware, the database should not get corrupted even if the Electrum USDT process is forcibly killed or there is loss of power. The worst case should be having to restart indexing from the most recent UTXO flush.

Once the process has terminated, you can start it up again with:

svc -u ~/service/electrum-usdt

You can see the status of a running service with:

svstat ~/service/electrum-usdt

svscan can of course handle multiple services simultaneously from the same service directory, such as a testnet or altcoin server. See the man pages of these various commands for more information.

You can monitor Electrum USDT server logs with:

tail -F /path/to/log/dir/current | tai64nlocal