bublina

You saw how to install the Electrum Bitcoin Wallet:

1. Go to electrum.org.
2. Navigate to Download section.
3. Download the right file for your system (MacOS).
4. Install downloaded Electrum to Applications.
5. Open the Terminal by pressing Command + SPACEBAR, terminal, ENTER.

Then you saw how to run it in Testnet mode from the terminal:

cd /Applications
cd Electrum.app
cd Contents
cd MacOS
./run_electrum --testnet

After that you were pressing Next (using the default settings) for most of the questions and when it came to generating your seed (twelve English words which is a human-readable way to write a very big random number) you copied it so that you could see them when you need to write them in the same order in the next step of the wizard. That was good for our testing purposes but do not do that with a real Bitcoin seed. Normally you would take a paper notebook and a pen and write the words down. Exactly in their order. The on-screen instructions in Electrum should be more than sufficient here.

Then after finishing the wizard you changed in Electrum to Receive tab and pressed New Address button which generated a new unique address belonging to your wallet. You sent that address to me over encrypted chat and I sent you some testing bitcoin (remember, unit is written with lower letter b, the network and software is with capital letter B).

HINT: You can receive some testing coins for free and without my help from coinfaucet.eu btc-testnet faucet (or search for others).

When you already saw the transaction (in History tab) we did following:

1. You went to Bitcoin Testnet Explorer (we used blockstream.info/testnet but feel free to use any other).
2. Now you pasted the address you received some bitcoin previously on into the search box.
3. It showed that 0.2 tbtc (testnet bitcoin) was on its way and there was also the transaction number link which lead you to even more detailed view where you could see the transaction fee for example.

We discussed that every transaction consists of INPUTs and OUTPUTs.

You also noticed that you see the UTXO (unspent transaction output) that was taken as an input to the transaction you received, so the part you received was easy to distinguish from the other part which was the “change” (the rest of the INPUT UTXO after subtracting the part you received and fee) which usually goes back to whoever sent you the transaction. There are some privacy considerations here, but we can get into that topic later.

Then you sent the testing bitcoin back to me to the address which you got from me. One address should be used only once.

If you will use a faucet to get the testing bitcoin, please send it back to the faucet (e.g. mv4rnyY3Su5gjcDNzbMLKBQkBicCtHUtFB which belongs to coinfaucet.eu) so that the coins may be recycled instead of being lost forever in your random testnet wallet..

That was our first Bitcoin Testnet lesson. In next lesson you will see how multi-sig wallets work and what they are good for.

Thank you for your time! Feel free to share this summary with your friends who would like to learn about Bitcoin using the Testnet network.

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