Crypto wallets for dummies
1. Introduction
As a trader in the most important cryptocurrencies for several months, I never needed to know how cryptowallets worked. The most straightforward way to trade in bitcoin/ethereum/litecoin was to open an account at a trusted broker like Kraken and start trading. There was no need to invest time in learning how these wallets work.
As a trader in mainly bitcoin it has always been in my intrest to keep myself informed about the new developments in the cryptocurrency. One of the ways I did this, is by following channels of people dedicated to anything that revolves bitcoin. Last week in one of these channels steemit was briefly mentioned. A healthy portion of curiosity made me come to steemit and learn what it all was about. Once I got to know how steemit worked, I immediately realized its potential and I knew Steem was going to soar. Steem was worth less than 1 $ and I knew I had to invest in it. But I couldn't because I didn't know how cryptowallets worked. The only thing I could do was sit and look how I missed out on something that could have given me a return of around 800 %.
I was a bit gutted that I missed such an obvious opportunity. But it is useless to stay dissapointed. Whenever you have a setback in life, the best thing you can do, is to stay positive about it and learn from that experience. What I learned is that it was about time to invest some time in learning how to use cryptowallets. So I made the promise to myself to find out how it works. I also know there were other people starting out with cryptocurrencies that wanted to know how to use cryptowallets. For those people, I decided to write this post to make it easy for them to use crypto wallets. In what follows I will describe how to create a bitcoin wallet, the easiest way to obtain some Satoshi's and how to send them to your wallet.
2. Download wallet
The first thing you will need to do, is to download a bitcoin wallet. There might be various ways to do this, but I am going to explain how I did it. The first thing you need to do, is to go to the following website and download the wallet:
In order to install it, I would advise you the following short video. The video might look childish but the information in it, is spot on.
Once this is done, you go to send/request and click on request.
This will pop open a window containing your address in the recipient box. Note that everytime you click on request a new address will be generated for you. You are the owner of all the addresses that are created by this procedure.
3. Free Satoshi
Now you have a wallet, the next thing you need is some Bitcoins in your wallet. For a starter, a good way to do this, is by getting some free Bitcoin (Satoshi) and send it to your wallet. There are many faucets to get free Bitcoin but most of them take a horrible lot of effort and time before they will actually send you some free Bitcoin. However, I found 1 site that allowed me to get a small amount of free Bitcoin without a lot of effort.
You have to pass your address and then spin the wheel. You will be rewarded with 100 Satoshi. When you collected 3500 Satoshi, after some days you will receive them automatically in your wallet. In my case, I received these Satoshi today. However, I can't do much with these Satoshi's yet because the amount appears too small to make a transaction. But at least, I could see that my understanding is correct. I passed the correct address and the correct amount of Satoshi arrived at my account. I am starting a second round of playing in order to double my amount of Satoshi so I can actually also send my Satoshi to another Bitcoin or Steem address.
4. Sending Steem Dollars to your Bitcoin wallet
I don't need to explain this anymore. Someone wrote a very nice post about this here on steemit.
https://steemit.com/steem/@craig-grant/new-convert-steem-dollars-to-bitcoin-with-blocktrades-us
5. Cashing out Bitcoin
One way to cash out your Bitcoin into dollars or euros, is by generating a bitcoin address in Kraken. (I don't know how to do this at other brokers as I don't have an account there). Then you can send your bitcoins to this address. Once the bitcoins arrive at Kraken, you can sell them and get fiat currencies instead.