The Beginners Guide To Blockchain.info Web Wallet.pdf - Google ...

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DISCLAIMER"

Although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure that the information in this book was correct at press time, the author and publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.

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Welcome to one of the first in a series of walkthroughs and tutorials from CoinTutor on some of the most popular bitcoin web wallets on the market today. While Bitcoin is still in it’s infancy and many have heard of the currency once or twice, the need for proper education of those new to the industry is important. 

As some early adopters will likely be yelling from the hills “how dare you trust a web based third party provider?” well the fact of the matter is that web wallets are the easiest to get started with, but once you’ve gotten familiar with the technology you can then confidently move to more secure options when the time arrives.

Up first on the list of industry players is BlockChain.info a web wallet that got it’s start back on August 30, 2011 originally as the PiUK-BlockchainBrowser to monitor double-spend attacks and various other currency statistics. 

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" When coming to the home page of Blockchain.info you are presented with a multitude of options when it comes to what is being presented to you. The main page is broken up into six separate sections:  

1. Most Recent Blocks - are broken up into 6 separate columns of data. 

A. Height - The sequential number of the most recent block. 

B. Age - When was the block first found.

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C. Transactions (Tx) - The number of individual transactions that make up that entire block.

D. Total Sent - Total amount of bitcoin involved in that particular block’s transactions.

E. Relayed by - The mining pool and/or miner responsible for finding said bitcoin blocks.

F. Size(kb) - The amount of transaction data contained in the solved block.

2. Latest Transactions - are a real time data stream of the most recent unconfirmed transactions on the bitcoin network.

3. Search - allows you to enter either a bitcoin address, transaction (tx) hash, block height, block hash, hash160, or ipv4 address. 

4. News - powered by Zeroblock which was acquired by Blockchain.info in Dec. 2013. 

5. Other Links - to things such as most popular addresses, largest transactions, double spends, nodes, etc.

6. Ad Space - I mean they are running one of the world’s largest bitcoin wallets for free what did you expect?

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" BlockChain’s Bitcoin Web Wallet

The get started page for your new web wallet is located here . The top row of the site has the most important links for you to access. Namely the “start a new wallet” link, “Existing user login”, and support. When writing this guide I came across something that stuck out to me and something I hadn’t noticed until I was doing a thorough walkthrough of the site. There are two options for you to create a new account one under the other, as I’m sure this space could be utilized for a better on boarding experience. 

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" On the next screen we are presented with a simple new account screen one of the simplest sign up forms in the bitcoin industry to this day. Enter your email and a secure password with at least 10 characters and preferably using upper/lower case characters and numerics. 

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Upon creation of the new wallet you are presented with another screen that displays your mnemonic word phrase that is used to recover your wallet in the event of a lost password, or computer failure, but not against theft from careless storage. Always remember that bitcoin security by and large is your responsibility. 

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" Once you’ve written down and/or printed out a copy of your wallet seed phrase, you will be presented with the new home page of your Blockchain bitcoin wallet. Side Note: A browser page refresh will automatically log you out. 

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" Now let’s take a look at the available options in your new bitcoin web wallet.  We have a snapshot of your account’s activity, primary bitcoin address and QR code, 3rd party purchase exchanges based on locality, 3rd party partners, account settings, and backup.  

Main Account Activity:  

Includes the total number, total received, total sent, and final balance of transactions made to the account over it’s entire history. 

Quick Access Bitcoin Address: 

QR code useful for P.O.S (Point of Sale) transactions, and the corresponding bitcoin address.

3rd Party Exchanges: 

There are a number of online exchanges that are useful in obtaining bitcoin in the following countries: Europe, Japan, & Australia.

3rd Party Partners: 

A number of partners ranging from P2P loans, gift card providers, etc. 

Account Settings: 

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Personal - Email, Email Verification Code, and Phone Number

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General - Handle Bitcoin links, Inactivity Logout, Default Fee Policy, Automatic Email Backups

. Display - Languages, Local Currency, Bitcoin Display, Transactions Per Page

. Notifications - (Email, SMS, Google Talk, Skype, Boxcar.io, HTTP, Android, HTML5); #ofConfirmations

. Passwords - Mnemonic, Main Password, Secondary Password, Password Hints

. Security - 2FA, Keep Browser Backup, Secret Phrase, Block TOR, IP restriction

. Logging - Disabled, Hashed, IP & UserAgent

. Devices - Device Pairing

. Debugging -More Advanced Developer Focused Tools

Backup: 

You have five alternative backup options available to you such as downloading directly to PC, downloading to Dropbox,  downloading to Google Drive, Emailing the backup to yourself, or printing out a paper wallet. 

Now that we have taken a look around the main dashboard area, the next section we would like to bring our attention to has 4 main areas in which to transact and manage your web wallet. They are My Transactions, Send Money, Receive Money, and Import/Export. Let’s take a look at each one in more detail to see what is offered on each screen.

Your Transaction History & Details 

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" In keeping the consistency of information that corresponds with this guide and the brand new account, I don’t have any transactions available for view but this is where you can go and get a more in-depth analysis of your pending and completed transactions. 

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Let’s Send Some Coin

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" Quick Send - Without a doubt the simplest and quickest way to send bitcoin directly from your wallet. Simply drop in a bitcoin address or use your computer webcam to capture a QR code if needed.

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Custom Send - If you want a little more control of your transaction before sending it over, you have the ability to choose the address you want the www.cointutor.com

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payment to come from if you have separated your addresses into personal, business, savings, etc. The option to add a configurable miner’s fee, however if your not sure what your doing I would leave it at the default of 0.0005BTC as it could delay the time in which your transaction is included in a block on the network. Change address allows one to choose a particular address for all changes outputs, and lastly a place to put a Public Note which is only viewable on the Blockchain.info site. For example when the Silk Road bit coins were seized by the U.S Government someone tagged the address as such and people where able to send tiny amounts of bitcoin to the address with notes attached.

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" Shared Coin - Allows you to mix your coins in a trust less way to obfuscate the origins of the originating or receiving bitcoin address or entity. It makes it extremely difficult to analyze the relationships with the naked eye, thats not to say that the transactions could be traced backed to the original sender via software and algorithms.  

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" Send via Email - For the vast amount of people who are introduced to bitcoin the easiest methods for adoption will be to use something in which they are already familiar with such as email and in the following section sms text messages. 

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Send SMS - In many developing nations the access to desktop computers and traditional internet services are not as established and in most cases www.cointutor.com

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prohibitively expensive. Using capable mobile devices with internet access to make payments and settle debts is more common in developing nations and so transferring value via mobile devices is another positive interaction that a newcomer can associate bitcoin with. 

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Address Book - All good bitcoin web wallets have an address book that allows you to keep track of payments sent, received, etc. 

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" Everybody’s Favorite Part: Receiving Money

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New Cold Storage Address - Like all good bitcoin web wallets Blockchain.info offers it’s users the ability to send an amount of bitcoins to a new paper wallet for offline cold storage. 

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" " View Relationship Diagram - Analyze the relationships between addresses via inputs and outputs. 

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Group Addresses By Taint - Group addresses by taint analysis in the wallet interface. 

Verify Message - If you ever have the need to prove ownership of a particular bitcoin address, BlockChain offers the ability to verify messages signed by another users public key. 


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Import/Export Here you are presented with a advanced warning letting you know whats lies behind the prompt that it’s an place were you can do some damage if you don’t know that your doing. However you are in a different situation as you are reading the definitive beginners’ guide to BlockChain.info and we are going to get you comfortable with what lies beyond. 

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Honestly one of the main reasons you would come here is if you already had a private key that you were looking to import into a web wallet, someone would have given you a private key in the wallet import format (WIF) of 5K6jCw9ZxfbSQ… 

You are asked for your password in order to authenticate you as the real owner, and once authenticated are presented with six options to perform various tasks.

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" Import - You can use Blockchain as a cold storage address monitor by importing “watch-only” bitcoin addresses, sweeping private keys, and importing a paper wallet. 

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Import Backup - Import backups from the Blockchain servers if you ever need to turn back time. 

Import Wallet - If you need to move a desktop wallet or other insecure private keys to Blockchain.info you are given a myriad of options such as: Blockchain.info AES encrypted backup and plain text json backup, or output from Pywallet, Multibit, or Vanitygen. 

Export Encrypted - For the large majority of users who want to export private keys the encrypted version is good enough but if you want to do some more tinkering then the next option of unencrypted will satisfy your needs. 

Export Unencrypted - Only export keys in this format if you know what your doing, as every single bit of information associated with your wallet is printed in clear text and very susceptible to attacks from hackers. 

Paper Wallet - Another easy option to generate a paper wallet on the fly. 

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In Conclusion With the above detailed guide on Blockchain.info I feel confident that using your first bitcoin wallet will go much more smoothly, and ease a lot of new users fears that bitcoin and associated services are hard. We have just gone through the entire BlockChain.info web wallet offering and broke down each feature and corresponding actions complete with images should assure you that this is no more complicated than it was when you first made your Facebook account and invited some friends along for the journey. 

As one of the first bitcoin web wallets from the early days of the industry to today, Blockchain.info stands as one of the pillars of the bitcoin ecosystem. I felt it was important to walkthrough one of the most open wallets on the internet so that many users of bitcoin future and present will greatly benefit from a service that has their users privacy as an utmost concern. 

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