Topic: Need a practical instruction and advice about starting using BTC. - page 2. (Read 335 times)

NO! This can't be emphasized enough: People have lost their Bitcoins when their Forkwallet contained malware. Don't even think about Forkcoins before your Bitcoins are safe in a new wallet.

Actually, it's 455 GB by now.

"It depends": If you have 0.01 Bitcoin, I would recommend to download Electrum (watch out for fake sites!) and move it there. If you have a much larger amount, there are different possibilities to keep it safe, but considering your questions, a hardware wallet (Trezor or Ledger) is probably the safest and easiest. It depends on how much you're willing to risk and learn.

Don't forget to backup your wallet.dat before doing anything else.

Yes, you can claim the forked coins any time you want as long as you have the private key for your address. It doesn't matter if you have spend your Bitcoins or not.
But for security reasons, it's highly advised to move your btc to a new wallet before claiming the forked coins (entering your private key into different wallet apps)

Buy a hardware wallet. If you can't afford to by one, make sure to use only non custodial open source wallets which have a good reputation. Electrum is one of those wallet but it only supports bitcoin.
Instead of exporting your keys and I porting them into a new wallet, I recommend creating a new one and moving your funds to it.

Claiming forks means you are exposing your wallet private key and this contains risk. You should know you use your private key to claim forks, not your Bitcoin. You must have Bitcoin at the fork time, if you don't have it, you have a balance is 0, so claiming does not give you anything.

Because of private key leak, you must move your Bitcoin to another wallet (not another address in a same wallet) and after that, you can start claiming forks.

Choose non custodial wallets to download. Then verify what you download. Next, install it, create your wallet. Back it up. Test your backup. Try to recover your wallet from a backup. If all are fine, you can use that wallet to store your Bitcoin.

Don't store your backup in email, cloud. Write it down, store it offline.

It means you import a private key.

You can use sweep. Like this Can I sweep private keys from other Bitcoin clients?

Yes. It is actually preferred that you move the BTC to the new address first, then claim any forks from the old addresses.


There is a topic at the top of this board: [General] Bitcoin Wallets - Which, what, why? I suggest you take a look at it. There is also a list of recommended wallets at: https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet

I suppose each of these wallets are safe if downloaded from an official source. ^{(I suggest you learn how to verify GPG signatures.)} In terms of convenience and simplicity, that is a matter of personal taste. I personally prefer the Electrum wallet or one of the open source hardware wallets.

Not possible. Even bitcoin which is the full client won't require more than 400 gigabyte.

As long as you have the coins before (not after) the fork. Read this to understand more about it:

LoyceV's Bitcoin Fork claiming guide (and service)

You do not necessarily have to spend your bitcoin before having control over the fork coins, it's yours, you can do whatever you want with any of them. 

Why not try buy hardware wallet: Open source hardware wallet

Or go for electrum code storage: https://www.google.com/search?q=Electrum%20cold%20storage

Key importation would work. But if you used online wallet before and the amount is huge and you want to use cold storage for it, best to just transfer the bitcoin instead of importing the private key.

answer 1. I would defenately tell you to ALWAYS spend your BTC first BEFORE claiming any forks. Only claim forks after your btc wallet is completely empty (any leftover funds moved to a new, clean, fresh wallet). If not, there might be issues like replay attacks or malware in forked clients and you could potentially lose your btc. It's much better to lose your forked coins than losing your btc.

BTW, you know you can only claim funds on future forks, right? If you buy btc now, you won't be able to claim bch or bsv or....

answer 2. Depends on how much you hold and what you plan to do with it. If you're only experimenting and need a wallet for a limited amount of funds and a lot of learning, i'd probably go for electrum. If you plan to invest a lot and not move it around all that often, but you still want convenience, i'd go for a hardware wallet... A ledger or something... If you want even more security, you could go for an airgapped wallet, or a properly generated paper wallet, but those kinds of setups need to be done *right*, it's harder to set them up, and if you mess up you could end up with a less secure environment than if you'd use a hardware wallet.

Hi,

I am considering myself a newbie even if I own some BTC for a long time, from earlier than 2015 .
I own btc, but I didn"t do anything with them a long, long time. The wallet that I currently have is the one which needs to download terabites of data before it makes BTC available to use. I don't remember its name, but it is one of thouse oldest wallets.
I need curretly 3 things to do:
1. To move to another wallet.
2. To enable myself to claim forks to get them. Preferably later and without to hurry up.
3. Start using BTC, spending, selling them etc.

But as I was not following the changes in the  BTC  world for many years, currently I don't know how to handle all this.

I shall be grateful if you guys  explain for me things like you would explain for a little kid, with as simple words as possible.
I asked questions at Stackexchange, and good people answered, but answers were so advanced for me that I didn't understand anything :-) I understood nothing at all :-)

My questions are:

1. Can one use BTC now but claim forks later for all previous years?
Or is it so that when one spends BTC, it authomatically makes it impossible to claim forks?
Please answer simply, like for a kid, for example: "yes, you can claim forks for previous years later even if you spend all of your BTC now", or "First you need to claim forks, because spent BTC authomatically means lost possibility to claim forks". 
Answers that I would understand should be on the level like this :-) Not a higher level :-)
Or even like this:
"Get forks first, then use BTC."
or
"You can use BTC now and get forks later, there is no hurry".
I would be glad if there were possibily to use BTC now and get forks later, because it is very complicated for me to learn how one claims forks, so I need time, and best for me were  to move this thing to do about forks to the future.
If such possibility exists, should I do anything special in order not to lose this possibility when I move my BTC to a new wallet?

2. Moving to a new wallet. Which wallet is safe, convenient and simple to use for a non-advanced user like me?
Is it so that to move my BTC to a new wallet, I need 2 things:
First download a new wallet.
Then "copy" a "key" from the old wallet and "paste" it to the new wallet?
It is the way the transfer of BTC between 2 wallets works?
I heard the word "export key". Does it mean just "copy" and "paste" the key?

Thank you very much guys and sorry for my being so unfamiliar with things that are probably basic.

Or may be  just give me an instruction (like you would do for a kid or like for a grandfather :-)) about how and in which order to complete 3 tasks:

1. To move to another wallet. Which one?
How?
2. To enable myself to claim forks to get them. Preferably later and without to hurry up.
3. Start using BTC, spending, selling them etc.


I shall be grateful for your answers and explanations.