electrum-personal-server VS specter-desktop

Follow the instructions on Electrum Personal Server. Don't let the word "server" deter you. Often this can mean "open a localhost http port". Assuming you have enough privledge on your PC to bind a TCP/IP port, you should be fine.

There are some server implementations that make use of XPUBs. For instance, Electrum Private Server is an implementation that must be configured with XPUBs of all wallets you want to use with it, so it can scan the blockchain for them, in return for much lower resource usage than regular servers that have to index the necessary information of every transaction ever made. But EPS is only suitable for private use, hence the name.

(A) Link it to your own Bitcoin Core node. You will need a little indexer called Electrum Private Server. https://github.com/chris-belcher/electrum-personal-server/releases . Once you do that, you won't have to ask any other Bitcoin node for transaction history or to broadcast your transactions. You become your own bank, literally.

Electrum Personal server v0.2.4 (Released: 16th June 2022) - https://github.com/chris-belcher/electrum-personal-server/releases

You need Electrum PERSONAL Server, not Electrum Server. Big difference!

To gain some privacy by using Electrum you should set up Tor on Network preferences or by installing your own Electrum server via Electrum Personal Server, ElectrumX or Electrs.

https://github.com/cryptoadvance/specter-desktop https://github.com/sparrowwallet/sparrow

You can for example use it to run specter-desktop (https://github.com/cryptoadvance/specter-desktop) on top for example, to use your hardware wallet with improved privacy or even mix them together to create multi-sig setups.

Also, the functioning of your hardware wallet isn't dependent on this corporations still existing. There is various free and open source software that lets you manage your hardware wallet, and even combine them to make multi-sig wallets (https://github.com/cryptoadvance/specter-desktop) . This lets you access all information via your own Bitcoin node, no third party system required, fully decentralized.

Take a look at Specter Desktop (https://github.com/cryptoadvance/specter-desktop) , which is a web interface for Bitcoin Core that lets you use basically every hardware wallet directly with your node.

Specter Desktop v1.14.1 (Released: 08th December 2022) - https://github.com/cryptoadvance/specter-desktop/releases

Alternatively you can purchase multiple devices from different manufacturers and create a multisig wallet that requires multiple signatures from multiple devices. Wallet software like Specter-Desktop can help you with this. They also have a DIY signer https://github.com/cryptoadvance/specter-diy

What you can do is to use one or more of this hardware wallets with your own node and a software like specter-desktop (https://github.com/cryptoadvance/specter-desktop) on top. This way you are completely self sufficient.

It is most likely an issue that is solved in the upcoming version of Specter; you might be interested in trying this prerelease, or wait for the official release: https://github.com/cryptoadvance/specter-desktop/releases/tag/v1.13.1-pre1

Specter runs in Electrum, but you can technically set it up to be run through a web browser, as long as you're hosting the service yourself.

Specter Desktop v1.9.4 - Release page - Upgrade guide UIUX: Overhaul of UTXO list, handling of locked UTXOs and scrollbar added to tx-table web component; + various bug fixes, chores and docs. See release page for full notes.