So I Have Discovered BitCoin

[Gerowen]

So I discovered Bitcoin, partly because of a news article, and installed the official client from the Ubuntu repositories.  Before that though, I installed "Multibit", because I didn't know the official one was in the Ubuntu repos, and spent about an hour on some different websites taking surveys to rack up some free BitCoins.  From what I understand, you're basically anonymous.  I mean you can give out your "Receiving Address" for people to send funds to you, but that does not give them access to "withdraw" funds because the address is different, and even if you send/receive money with somebody, they won't have access to some of your more personal information.  Is this all correct?

 

I've read the stuff on the website, and I'm aware that by using the client, my "wallet" is stored as a file on my computer, and if that file is lost, the BitCoins in it are lost.  Outside of that however, I really don't know much about it.

 

Does anybody have anything they've learned about it that wasn't plainly obvious from the documentation?  If I have a couple of receiving addresses set up on MultiBit, is there a way to transfer those receiving addresses over to the official client so I don't have two clients running to accomplish the same goal?

 

Just a wee nooblet here testing the waters to see how this all works.

[lars77]

Don't think of it as "free money", you're really going to have to buy some eventually.  Those free faucets were interesting maybe 1-2 years ago, but nowadays you can spend a lot of time there & you're going going to get the equivalent of half a cent or something, not really anything worthwhile.  You're better off working for a normal wage & then buying some bitcoin, or selling things for bitcoin (e.g. on bitmit or similar).

 

re: Anonymity, it's not quite as anonymous as people like to make it sound.  The bitcoin blockchain acts as a a public ledger of all bitcoin transactions, anyone can view it.  You'd need to know someone's bitcoin address(s) of course.  If you wanted you could track a bitcoin transaction's travels through the blockchain using a site like blockchain.info.

 

If you're using the default bitcoin-qt software, yes you want to back up your wallet.dat file.  And make sure to encrypt it with a strong passphrase!  Technically, if you store your private key somewhere offline then you won't lose your bitcoins even if you lost the wallet.dat file, and/or memorize a "brain wallet" for yourself.  e.g. if you memorize a random complicated passphrase that should be enough to never forget a bitcoin address (play around w/ http://brainwallet.org/ to see what I mean).

 

There's a lot more info than I can really cover of course ;)  You might want to join us at http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin, there's way more bitcoin users there that can explain this stuff better than me ;)