For the impatient: Skip to step 1 Bitcoin is one of the most interesting technologies we have seen emerge in the past ten years.And it confuses everyone who sets out to use it.This post is my definitive guide to beginning your journey with bitcoin the right way.To me, the right way includes, but is not limited to: It is.This is my blog.You shouldn’t necessarily trust me or anyone – bitcoin isn’t about trust.But if you google “altoidnerd”, you’ll find that I have been around the bitcoin eco-system for quite some time.That’s all I can tell you.There are just so many wallets available – why bitcoin-core?Because I have been using it for years, I have a very good method of keeping my coins safe, and that is what I am sharing with you today.Use it- it is THE wallet.I am a linux and an OSX user.So please understand the scope of my knowledge includes these operating systems.If you want to use OSX, most of this tutorial will make sense with minor changes perhaps.If you want to use windows, that’s ok, I’m not going to judge you.

Bitcoin-core is available for windows as well.Please understand however, I am not a windows user, so I will not be able to give you “the definitive bitcoin windows guide”.You can still read on, however, since you can apply much of this tutorial to usage of bitcoin-qt’s debug window instead of the command line.’s official download page and select the bitcoin-core distribution for your operating system.And do choose linux (tgz).Do that because you should be running linux.But if you aren’t, even though you should be, choose the distribution for your operating system.Extract and install the client.To really take control of things, and understand what is happening, you’re going to want to run bitcoin software from the command line.Though it isn’t really necessary to download the thing from the command line, I’m going to describe that here because this tutorial is the first installment of a start to finish command line approach.For a sneak peak of what I mean, see an earlier post where I described how to use bitcoin-core to generate QR codes without having to trust shady ass websites.

Go to your home directory and create a new directory just for bitcoin.This is not a necessary step, but once again, this is my “right way” tutorial and I will explain reasons for this later on.bitcoin 2014 in amsterdamEnter the directory, and download the tarball with the “wget” command.ethereum payment channelsThe extract the tarball like so: tar -xzvf bitcoin-0.11.0-linux64.tar.gz Sweet.hacker di bitcoinNow change directory to where the binaries are, and launch “bitcoin-qt” (qt means its the GUI version).bitcoin precio salida./bitcoin-qt It’s going to show you the dialogue box below and ask you if you’d like to use the default directory.bitcoin platform stupid

You’ll see a friendly startup screen if you’ve done things right!Bitcoin-core is called a “full-node” implementation, which means the first time you start it on your machine, it’s going to download every single bitcoin transaction that has ever taken place.bitcoin miner nvidiaWait until the blockchain is synced to start making transactions.ethereum buy in malaysiaIn the mean time, you need to set a passphrase for your wallet.ethereum pool 2017This is super important.fc bitcoin 2014In the upper left corner of bitcoin-qt, go to settings -> Encrypt Wallet, and set a very strong passphrase.This will make it impossible for anyone to send bitcoins from your wallet without entering your password: Once you encrypt your wallet, you can copy and store wallet.dat everywhere (I explain wallet.dat in great detail in “Step 3”).

I literally have copies of my main wallet.dat on 6 or 7 computers, because come hell or highwater, I will always be able to find a copy of my wallet.dat file.I suggest you do the same.Here is why strong encryption and insane redundancy works: If your password is ridiculously long, you can be very lazy and downright cavelier about where you keep your wallet.dat, because even if someone finds the wallet file, they wont be able to do a damn thing with it.They won’t be able to spend your coins without your passphrase.This means that you can make copies of wallet.dat and store them like literally everywhere, on all your machines, three times over.On your mom’s computer.Hell, theoretically speaking, you can post your encrypted wallet.dat on the internet and just about everyone will have a copy, and be unable to spend your coins, because they don’t know your password.Someone remind me to put some coins into an address, and post the encrypted wallet online to prove my point.Bottom Line If you encrypt your wallet like a boss, you never forget your password, you never tell anyone your password, and you copy the file to everywhere you possibly can imagine, you will never lose your coins.

And nobody will be able to steal them from you.It is computationally impossible.Step 3: Understand what you just did on your computer Let’s break it down this way.Here are some things that just happened when you launched bitcoin-qt for the first time: A hidden directory ~/.bitcoin was created.It contains among other things the single most important thing ever: a file called wallet.dat.This file is critical.~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat contains all of your private keys.When you see in headlines in the news like “Frustrated gentleman quite upset having lost a usb jump drive containing 100,000 BTC“, it means he doesn’t have a copy of wallet.dat, so neither he, nor anyone on earth, nor God himself can spend his coins anymore.Your computer started downloading the blockchain.The blockchain is a record of every bitcoin transaction ever to have taken place.This will take a few days.As of today, the blockchain is about 42 gigabytes.Make sure you have space for it.Do not delete your wallet.dat file.

If you want to start a new wallet, instead of deleting wallet.dat, just rename it to something else, like wallet.dat.old, restart bitcoin-qt, and it will create a new wallet for you.Keep your wallets people.Notice how I have a file called wallet.dat.default?That’s because I never delete a wallet.When I installed bitcoin on this computer, I moved the wallet.dat that stores my coins into ~/.bitcoin/, but first I renamed the existing file so I can keep it.I’m telling you – don’t delete a file called wallet.dat, because mistakes happen, and its better to have hundreds of files named wallet.dat.* than it is to lose your coins.In my next post, I will describe some of the features of the bitcoin-qt debug window, bitcoind and its helper bitcoin-cli.You can do interesting things, like import new keys, or convert keys to qr-codes.If you have ay questions, please feel free to comment or contact me.If you liked this post, you can donate bitcoins to me here: 12gKRdrz7yy7erg5apUvSRGemypTUvBRuJ Learn about the author here: http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~majewski