My first time setting up an Ethereum Wallet, and the steps I took to do it

Last week I wrote a post about trying my hand at Ethereum mining. As a complete newbie to Ethereum I quickly learned that I couldn’t dive into mining without at least getting some basic knowledge under my belt. Sure, I knew what Ethereum was, but the buck pretty much stopped there.

So I’ve been reading the subreddit on Ethereum Mining (reddit.com/r/ethermining) to get a better understanding of what’s going on in the mining community, and their Ethereum Mining 101 guide has become my go-to resource for learning the basics.

One of the first lessons I learned is that you can’t start mining until you have a wallet to store the ether that you mine. Yes, some of you might be saying “duh Morgan,” but like I said, this is all new to me. I also learned that there are two kinds of wallets, desktop and online and it is highly recommended by the pros to use a desktop wallet as your primary means of storage.

Though an online wallet is never suggested as a primary means of storage (see this screenshot of a service that was compromised recently), it can be done. (Source – Ethereum Mining 101)

So…I decided to stick with a Desktop wallet and it looks like Mist is the most widely used, and for all I know it could be the only one out there since every tutorial on Ethereum Wallets that I found seemed to point to Mist. Here’s the steps that I followed to get everything up and running.

Step 1: Go to github.com/ethereum/mist/releases and scroll down until you find the download that corresponds to your operating system. If you’ve never downloaded anything from Github before this might be a little weird but trust me, it’s as easy as clicking the link that corresponds to the operating system your running. Just scroll down the page until you see this:

Step 2: This will create a folder, that in the case of windows is called “win-unpacked” so don’t expect it to be labeled as Mist, not sure why they didn’t call the folder Mist but hey, it still works. Inside the folder you’ll find an application that is a little more aptly named called “Ethereum Wallet”

Step 3: Next launch the Mist Ethereum Wallet app and get ready to wait, I mean really wait, as the blockchain downloads to your computer. This process took under an hour for me so it’s not endlessly long but I’d say expect between thirty minutes to an hour based on your Internet connection.

Step 4: Once the blockchain is finished downloading you’ll see the screen below which contains your wallet address which you’ll need to send and received ether. You can spot the wallet address just below “Main Account” – it’s that long string that begins with 0x.

Stay-tuned, as I continue to learn more about Ethereum and Ethereum Mining I’ll continue to post it here on my blog. Now time to figure out how to get this crazy mining software up and running!