Exercise 27: Bonus—use Blockstream wallet

In these exercises, the bitcoin wallet software we’ve been using has been mostly Sparrow. You also did a few exercises with Blue Wallet.

You used multiple wallets because by doing tasks like recovering seed phrases, setting up watch only wallets, and sending bitcoin across different wallets, you end up with a better understanding of the fundamentals of bitcoin.

When you do this, you learn about seed phrases and what they truly represent, the blockchain and transaction fees, and privacy and security for your bitcoin—all at a deeper level.

In this bonus exercise, you’ll install another bitcoin wallet application—Blockstream. Like Sparrow and Blue Wallet, it’s also open source. Here, instead of splitting out all the different tasks into different exercises, I’ll give you a list of the tasks, and you’ll figure out how to do it. You have done similar tasks in Sparrow and Blue Wallet, so you’ve got a good background.

In this exercise, you’ll set up your final separate wallet, with a new seed phrase. This wallet represents another bitcoin user, Dan.

·       Install Blockstream from the Blockstream site: https://blockstream.com/app. There are versions both for desktop and mobile.   

·       Create a new wallet with Blockstream. Instead of the term seed phrase, Blockstream uses recovery phrase. A 6-digit PIN is required. Create the wallet Dan, a standard single sig wallet, and use the defaults.

·       To get some sats into Dan, do a send from the Carol wallet on Blue Wallet, to Dan on Blockstream. You can completely empty the Carol wallet with this send. That way, you don’t need to worry about having leftover sats in Carol.

·       Use your Alice seed phrase to recover your Alice wallet in Blockstream. The default settings should be correct, and you should see all your transactions if you recovered the seed phrase correctly.

·       As your last step with Dan—send all the bitcoin in Dan (on Blockstream), to Alice. You can get the receive address for Alice either via the recovered wallet in Blockstream, or directly from the Alice wallet, in Sparrow.

So now you’ve had extensive experience in three bitcoin wallet applications—Sparrow, Blue Wallet, and Blockstream. Sparrow can be fairly straightforward, and gives you access to many tools and options. Blue Wallet is very simple, with limited options, but its simplicity makes it easy to use. And Blockstream is somewhere in between the two.

This hands-on experience with multiple different bitcoin wallets gives you a more comprehensive understanding of bitcoin, and also the flexibility to adapt to different tools. You’ve become a much more informed user.