How to set up a Blockstream Green wallet on iOS/Android?

How to set up a Blockstream Green wallet on iOS/Android?

Ruben Waterman Tutorials April 14, 2020

This article is outdated. Please refer to our BlueWallet blogpost which works much better with bittr’s services.

One of the quickest way to start sending and receiving bitcoin is by downloading the app called “Blockstream Green” from the App Store or Google Play Store. Before you start it is important to know that this process will take approximately 10 minutes and we recommend you to setup your bitcoin wallet in a calm and private place.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the app, you will be shown opening screen of “Blockstream Green”. Since you don’t have a wallet yet, you click on “Create New Wallet”.

Before you can continue using the “Blockstream Green” wallet, you will have to agree to their “Terms of Service” and click “Next”.

It is extremely important to back up your wallet. Wait? I need to back up my money?! Yes, contrary to the traditional financial system, where a bank is in charge of safekeeping your money, with cryptocurrencies you are responsible for your own money. Bitcoin works with a universal 12 or 24 word backup phrase, by which you can restore your bitcoin wallet in case you lose your phone for example.

Write down the first six words “Blockstream Green” shows you on a piece of paper and click “Next” until you've written all 24 words down. Please, do not keep a digital copy of these words on your computer as anyone access to these 24 words can access your bitcoin, it is therefore much safer to keep these offline on paper and preferably in a safe. If you are already using a password manager and intend to only store a small amount of bitcoin in the “Blockstream Green” wallet, you may consider storing the seed phrase as a secure note in the password manager. Please note that once you own a considerable amount of bitcoin, please switch to a hardware wallet!

After you wrote down the 24 words on a piece of paper and you click “Next” on the last page, you will be asked for a few random words out of your 24 word selection, in order to confirm that you wrote down all 24 words. Please make sure once again that you wrote down all 24 words correctly!

Now that you verified the backup phrase, which you can use to recover your bitcoin in case of emergency, it is time to protect your wallet for daily use. We recommend to configure a 6-digit PIN code, which will be asked by the “Blockstream Green” app as a confirmation once you want to send a payment.

Finally, we recommend you to at least configure one or two types of 2-Factor Authentication (2FA) for your own safety. Bear in mind that it would be preferred to use an email address, Google Authenticator or mobile phone number which is not configured on the device you are running the “Blockstream Green” app on.

Congratulations! You just set up your very first bitcoin wallet and you are ready to send and receive bitcoin!

After you click “Receive”, you will be shown the first address in your wallet, you may share this freely with the world as this is kind of like your bank account number. During the verification process of bittr, you may enter this is as your receiving address so that we can send you your bitcoin. After you've shared this address with bittr (or anyone else really!), we recommend to never share the address with anyone else for privacy reasons. Everyone who knows that address can look up on the bitcoin blockchain how much bitcoin is in your bittr piggybank!

Do you have any questions? Reach out to us at hello@getbittr.com!