Get Started with a Cryptocurrency on Windows – Part 1

While I am not going to claim any expertise in cryptocurrency, I have spent a bit of time dabbling in it in order to gain a working knowledge as well as keep a bit on hand as an alternative investment. There are many options out there for acquiring cryptocurrencies and storing or spending them on a variety of computer platforms. I am going to document one option that I use on Windows and the steps and tools needed to make it work. I will focus specifically on Litecoin here, but working with Bitcoin would be nearly identical. This Part 1 post will be fairly brief – I’ll describe the list of tools and steps that I use and then in a subsequent post (or posts) I will go into a little more detail on how to complete the steps.  Some of the steps here are optional and really depend on how careful you want to be. I’ll label the optional steps, but I think they are good habits to follow anyway.

First off, why go through all this trouble in the first place when one could simply buy some coins on Coinbase or another online wallet and leave them there? Also, why Windows?? Well, to answer the first question, ideally you should keep as much control over your money as you can. Once your local wallet is setup, it’s trivial to transfer your coins to it. There’s always the risk that an online site could be infiltrated by hackers and your money taken out. Obviously, there’s also risks to storing it yourself, but you are also a much smaller target to go after and you have more control (and at the end of the day, that’s what cryptocurrency is all about, having control over your money.) As for the use of Windows, the simple answer is that I am a long-time Windows user who enjoys the OS. I spend a lot of time on my Surface Pro so that is the environment in which I am most comfortable getting setup to work with cryptocurrency. There are a lot of mobile apps and wallets out there that are fairly turnkey, but setting up a wallet on a PC is a bit more involved. I am not sure how much documentation is out there on how to get started on Windows so I thought that it might be helpful to record a few notes on my blog.

Here are the list of tools that I use:

• Windows 10 Pro (Windows 10 Home can be used for most of this, but I recommend the Pro version mainly for the next point which is…)
• BitLocker – this is optional, but BitLocker allows drives to be encrypted. This includes SD cards, so that, for example, I can encrypt a MicroSD card plugged into my Surface and then remove it to store offline.
• Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) – I use the GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) tools to verify file downloads – again, an optional step but recommended. There are also other ways to do this, but this is the methodology that I went with.
• KeePass – a password manager – I use this to store the local wallet password and my wallet seed.
• Electrum-LTC – Litecoin wallet (there’s also an Electrum version for Bitcoin)
• Coinbase.com – very easy to use site for buying Bitcoin, Litecoin, or Ethereum

The basic steps to getting setup will be:

• Download and verify KeePass and Electrum-LTC
• Setup both of the above tools
• Receive and send some Litecoin

That’s it for this post. If any of this sounds interesting to you, then stick around for another write-up where I’ll have details about each of the steps above.