Bitcoin client on board guide

What is a Bitcoin wallet?

Bitcoin wallets are applications for sending, receiving and storing bitcoins

examples: desktop wallets, mobile wallets, hardware wallets, paper wallets, online hosted wallets

Bitcoin Wallets are just like your leather wallets,only difference is they are digital.

They contain bitcoin addresses which are comparable to account numbers

examples: Blockchain (mobile and web wallet), Mycelium (mobile wallet)

Your purse/wallet has different pockets for separating your cash and business cards, Bitcoin wallets also hold multiple addresses

Your bitcoin wallet balance is the sum of bitcoins in all your wallet addresses

How do I send bitcoins?

Sending bitcoins is as simple and fast as sending an email. Before sending, first, you must have some bitcoins in a bitcoin wallet.

Your recipient must also have a bitcoin wallet. She or he will share their public bitcoin address with you.

You will send bitcoins to their wallet address from your wallet

select the send To option. A prompt will come up asking you to enter the recipient’s public address
copy and paste the recipient's address.
double check to make sure it matches your recipient address. It helps to look at the first and last characters to confirm
Hit send and you are done!

Congratulations! You have now completed a bitcoin send transaction.

How do I receive bitcoins?

Receiving bitcoins is as simple and fast as receiving an email. Before receiving bitcoin, first, you must have a bitcoin wallet address.

You then share your bitcoin address with a sender

This is where the sender will send you bitcoins

Select the ‘Receive bitcoins’ option
Copy one bitcoin address under this option
double check to make sure you copied it correctly. It helps to look at the first and last characters to confirm
Share this bitcoin address with your sender to receive bitcoins

You will shortly receive bitcoins in your wallet address

What is a bitcoin address?

Bitcoin addresses are identifiers similar to account numbers that we are accustomed. They look like this 1QHrNh2AMTsktduB8vLi5ccECyr3Pof8dV

Bitcoins can only move from address to another. Addresses, therefore, are used for sending, receiving and storing bitcoins.

Wallets can contain many bitcoin addresses all linked to a single wallet. Your wallet automatically chooses one of them for either sending or receiving transactions.

Because at times they can be long and daunting to remember, they are often represented as QR code images.

QR code images are simple to use, they are scanned to send and receive bitcoins.

Instead of copy pasting a bitcoin address to share, you can opt to convert it into a QR code image and sharing it.

Try it now! Use http://bitcoinqrcode.org/ to convert your bitcoin address to image form. All bitcoin software applications recognize both QR code images and character bitcoin addresses.

Here is my QR image of my address 1QHrNh2AMTsktduB8vLi5ccECyr3Pof8dV

QR code.png

How do I check the progress of my bitcoin transactions

You can search to view the progress of your transaction on the Bitcoin network.

Copy and paste your bitcoin address into one of many explorers.

A summary of your transactions of this address will be displayed such as

total received
total sent
final balance
no. of transactions
no. of confirmations

One confirmation means your transaction has been processed. It takes about 5 - 10 minutes for a confirmation.

Where do I exchange bitcoins for Kenya shillings?

Bitpesa, a company based in Nairobi and Africa’s fastest & most affordable bitcoin exchange platform.

Bitpesa accepts Mpesa for bitcoin via paybill

Bitpesa pays out to your Mpesa for bitcoin

quick, fast and easy

Converting mpesa to bitcoins on Bitpesa (buying) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BITlOmRnudM

Converting Bitcoins to Mpesa on Bitpesa (selling) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENkRRYw8P_8

@Bitpesa on twitter

Bitpesa on facebook

Check out Bitpesa FAQ https://www.bitpesa.co/faq

What News sources for Bitcoin

Coindesk

Bitcoin Magazine

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/