Bitcoin

What does it all mean?

A wallet is a bit like a bank account. It stores your money, they are free to open and you can have as many as you like. You have an address attached to your wallet which is used to send and receive transactions.

When you send a transaction, it is sent to the blockchain which is where every Bitcoin transaction is stored, but before they get there they are processed by computers called miners. They get a small reward for 'mining' the transaction. This normally takes half an hour depending on the transaction fee.

Make a new wallet

A wallet is where Bitcoin are stored. We are going to start off with Coinbase (you'll understand why later).

1. Go and signup at https://www.coinbase.com/signup.
2. After verifying your email address. Click "Skip, I'll do this later".

Let's get some Bitcoin!

Go to https://www.trybtc.com/ and click through the tutorial. Please actually read the information because it's useful.

Now you'll have a little bit of Bitcoin in your wallet. On Coinbase go to the Accounts tab and your BTC Wallet should have some money inside.

bitcoin transactions take a while to process but you can (not on coinbase apparently) spend them before they have fully gone through the system

Send each other some Bitcoin.

Click on the Send/Request tab and send someone some bitcoin using their email address.

Transaction Information

Click on a Bitcoin transaction that you have in Coinbase.

Click on the link which says "???? confirmations" which will take you to a site which has information about that transaction.

What's all this?

Hash: Transaction ID.

Sum of incoming txs: The total transaction amount going into the blockchain.

Sum of outgoing txs: The total amount going into the wallet.

Fee: The fee paid to get it processed.

Confirmations: How many people have processed it.

Included in block: The block in the blockchain the tx is included in.