1. How To Send Money From Paypal To Bitcoin Wallet
2. How To Send Money From Mpesa To Bitcoin Wallet
3. How To Send Money To The Bitcoin Wallet
4. How To Send Money Through Bitcoin Wallet
5. How To Send Money To My Bitcoin Wallet

• Once you are a verified member, you can connect your bank account or credit or debit card to your Uphold wallet. If you want to fund your wallet with dollars, on the main dashboard, click on the “USD Card” icon. On the next page, click on “Add Funds” and select “Fund With Bank Account” or “Fund From Credit/Debit Card”.
• Click on Send and select Bitcoin from the Currency drop-down menu. If you have multiple sub-wallets, you can choose the sub-wallet you want to send from in the From drop-down menu. In the To field, paste the recipient’s address OR scan the recipient’s QR code. Enter the amount you want to send. Add an optional description for your transaction.

You may have just downloaded your first Bitcoin wallet, but now want to know how to add coins to it.

Doing your first transfer from an exchange to a wallet can be intimidating for first timers.

Not to worry! In this short guide, we will show you how to add coins to your Bitcoin wallet. Once you are finished you’ll be a pro at this very common process.

By the end, you’ll see how easy it is to send and receive Bitcoins from anyone you want!

But first, in case you haven’t got a wallet yet, check out our picks below:

You’ll see the total amount of Bitcoin in your Coinbase wallet on the left. We want to send the Bitcoin from this wallet to our Ledger Nano S wallet. Here is where you copy and paste your Ledger Nano S public address. Keep in mind that, as I said, this process is the same for all exchanges.

How To Send Money From Paypal To Bitcoin Wallet

Our Top Picks

Best Wallet For

Best for Security

Ledger Nano X

Secure storage for any cryptocurrency

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The Ledger Nano X is the newest crypto hardware wallet, and is very easy to use. It connects to iOS, Android & desktop.

Best for Mobile

BRD

Easy to use iOS & Android wallet

Learn More

BRD is an easy-to-use iOS and Android Bitcoin wallet. It's available on both iOS and Android.

Best for Desktop

Electrum

Simple yet powerful desktop wallet

Learn More

Electrum is a Bitcoin-only wallet that has been around since 2011. It's easy to use, but has advanced features.

On a technical level, your wallet is more like a window onto the Bitcoin network that you control with your own electronic private keys. Whether you use a super secure hardware wallet like the Ledger Nano X, a convenient mobile app like the BRD wallet or an old school favorite Electrum you’ll need to be sure to keep your private keys safe.

I have a wallet, do I have to buy a whole bitcoin?

It’s a common misconception to think that you need to buy one whole bitcoin at a time. These days, that would be quite an expensive endeavour. You can check out the current price of one bitcoin, here.

Instead, the inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, made it possible to divide one bitcoin into 100,000,000 pieces.

QUICK TIP

One bitcoin is divisible to 8 decimal places and you can own as little as 0.00000001 bitcoin. In reality, most places where you can buy bitcoin allow you to spend as little as $5 at a time.

In 2010 an early member of the bitcointalk community, ribuk, proposed the name ‘satoshi’ for the smallest unit of a bitcoin, and the name stuck. In recent years it’s become common to use the phrase “stacking sats” for buying and holding small amounts of bitcoin in order to periodically accumulate more of the coin.

The best place to buy your first bitcoin is on an exchange

Wallets themselves tend not to give you the option to buy and sell bitcoin for fiat. So, you’re going to have to find a trustworthy and low-cost exchange, and then send the coins from the exchange to your wallet.

• Bits of Gold

  • Crypto exchange based in Tel Aviv
  • Buy with card, cash or bank transfer
  • Supports Bitcoin & Ethereum
• eToro

  • Start trading fast; high limits
  • Easy way for newcomers to get bitcoins
  • Your capital is at risk.
• Luno

  • Best for Nigeria, South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia
  • East to use interface
  • Trusted exchange
• Coinbase

  • High liquidity and buying limits
  • Easy way for newcomers to get bitcoins
  • 'Instant Buy' option available with debit card
• Bitbuy

  • Exchange based in Canada
  • Very high buy and sell limits
  • Supports Interac & wire
• Netcoins

  • Crypto exchange based in Canada
  • Many payment methods available
  • Get $10 CAD upon making $100+ in trades
• Coinberry

  • Crypto exchange based in Canada
  • Very high buy and sell limits
  • Supports credit & debit card, Interac, wire
• eToro

  • Supports Bitcoin, Ethereum & 15 other coins
  • Start trading fast; high limits
  • Your capital is at risk.

  This ad promotes virtual cryptocurrency investing within the EU (by eToro Europe Ltd. and eToro UK Ltd.) & USA (by eToro USA LLC); which is highly volatile, unregulated in most EU countries, no EU protections & not supervised by the EU regulatory framework. Investments are subject to market risk, including the loss of principal.

An ideal fiat cryptocurrency exchange for people just getting started is Coinbase. For the following reasons:

• It has the most simple and easy to use user interface
• It’s quck to get verified so you can buy bitcoin almost instantly
• There are great mobile apps for Android and iPhone
• Coinbase is a regulated and FDIC insured exchange

Three important factors for choosing which exchange is the right choice for you are reputation, fees and speed:

Reputation

How To Send Money From Mpesa To Bitcoin Wallet

It’s sad to say, but a lot of exchanges in the past turned out to be scams. That means the longer an exchange has been around, building up a positive reputation, the less likely it is to be a bad actor in the space.

You can also check if the exchange is regulated in your part of the world. We reviewed the top exchanges we would recommend, here.

Fees

Another important factor in choosing the right exchange to fund your bitcoin wallet is to compare how much they will charge for converting your fiat to bitcoin.

On average the fees for credit card purchases are around 4%. If you send your money via bank transfer you usually save on fees and can expect to pay somewhere between 1 and 1.5%.

Speed

Finally it’s important to look at how quickly will you be able to buy and then receive your coins. It’s interesting to note that a lot of the problems connected with how quickly you can fund your Bitcoin wallet, are actually due to the slowness of the legacy financial systems, and not cryptocurrency itself.

However, it’s a good idea to look at waiting times and withdrawal limits for the purchasing method of your choice as it’s never a good feeling to be caught out by these kind of factors when you want to buy some Bitcoin in a hurry.

Credit card purchases are usually quicker than bank transfers, but they come at a higher cost.

WARNING

Do NOT get comfortable leaving your cryptocurrency on an exchange. Ideally you should send your money to an exchange, purchase your crypto, and then withdraw the coins immediately to a secure hardware wallet like the Ledger Nano X.

COMPARISON

Ledger Nano X

• SCREEN:
• RELEASED: 2019
• PRICE: $119

Ledger Nano S

• SCREEN:
• RELEASED: 2016
• PRICE: $59

How To Send Money To The Bitcoin Wallet

TREZOR T

• SCREEN:
• RELEASED: 2018
• PRICE: $159

TREZOR One

• SCREEN:
• RELEASED: 2013
• PRICE: $59

How to withdraw to your wallet

The first few times you withdraw to a bitcoin wallet it can feel a bit nerve wracking. You do need to be careful and ensure that you follow the steps carefully. Wallets that have modern user interfaces and easy to follow step by step processes will help reduce the chance of you making a mistake.

The most important thing is to make sure that the wallet address you send your bitcoin to, the long string of numbers and letters, is correct. If you send your bitcoin to a different address by accident there is no way of getting your money back. So be careful.

As an example, if you are withdrawing from your Coinbase account to your Ledger Nano X you would follow these steps:

1. Select send BTC on Coinbase and enter the amount of BTC you want to send. You can send as little or as much as your BTC as you wish, but be aware that each withdrawal will have a fee. Once you are comfortable sending and receiving bitcoin it is worth learning a little more about transaction fees and how you can minimize the costs.

   
   

   Send from coinbase

2. Log in to your Ledger Live account and follow the instructions to copy your wallet address so that you can input it in Coinbase as the receiving address.First you must connect and unlock your Ledger, then open the Bitcoin app on your device.

   
   

3. Next, check the Bitcoin address that is showing on your device. It should be your Bitcoin wallet address, and nobody elses.

   
   

   Verify your Bitcoin address

4. Use the app to copy the address from Ledger Live, or scan the QR code that shows in Ledger live

   
   

5. From your Coinbase account. Double check the address by sight to ensure Coinbase is sending the bitcoin to your wallet address.

   
   

   Copy the address to Coinbase

How long will it take till my bitcoin arrives?

That depends. If you get into the next block, you Bitcoin will arrive in your wallet within about 10 minutes.This is the time it takes to get one confirmation on the Blockchain.

Typically you should wait 3-6 confirmations before you can be sure your bitcoin has arrived safely.

1 confirmation can be enough if you are sending less than $1000. Each confirmation is a block in the Bitcoin blockchain with your transaction recorded accurately.

These blocks are created about every ten minute by the Bitcoin miners. The miners verify the blocks and get rewarded with Bitcoin for their work.

Once the transaction has confirmed a few times, you can relax and be certain that you have added the funds correctly.

The Bitcoin halving is creating a real buzz as Bitcoin hodlers expect the next bull run. One of the issues with the increase in price is the increase in transaction fees with the Bitcoin network cost peaking at $55 per transaction in the previous bull run of 2017. As transactions fill the Bitcoins mempool at a frantic rate, the only way to speed up your transaction is to incentives the miner, which drives up transaction costs and can turn into a bidding war and freeze cheaper transactions.

These costs made it impractical for many users to want to transfer payments on the network and this posed a serious scalability issue which needed to be addressed.

One of the proposed solutions was the lightning network, a decentralised side-chain/second layer solution which has been one of the most anticipated features currently in active development.

The Lightning Network (LN) has different wallets and wallet address but function as a regular Bitcoin wallet with a capability to open an LN payment channel on the first layer Bitcoin network. Currently, LN wallets are not very user friendly, possibly since the Lightning Network is still in its early stages of public testing so be sure never to hold BTC on it for the long term or hold too much BTC in a lightning wallet.

How the Lightning Network works

The Lightning Network is a decentralised network using smart contract functionality in the blockchain to enable instant and affordable payments across a network of participants. The Lightning Network is dependent upon the underlying Bitcoin blockchain to secure transaction data once payment channels are closed, and Bitcoin is removed from this Layer 2. By using real Bitcoin/blockchain transactions and using its native smart-contract scripting language, it is possible to create a secure network of participants to transact at high volume and high speed.

The function of the Lightning Network

The function of the Lightning Network is to create a complementary chain where multiple payment channels exist. LN operations use smart contracts to create transfers between wallets via the help of nodes. The network finds the most efficient path between nodes and wallets to get transactions to wallets as fast and as cheap as possible.

Bidirectional payment channels

Two participants create a ledger entry on the blockchain, which requires both participants to sign off on any spending of funds. Both parties create transactions which refund the ledger entry to their individual allocation but do not broadcast them to the blockchain. They can update their individual allocations for the ledger entry by creating many transactions spending from the current ledger entry output. Only the most recent version is valid, which is enforced by blockchain-parsable smart-contract scripting. This entry can be closed out at any time by either party without any trust or custodianship by broadcasting the most recent version to the blockchain.

Lightning Network

By creating a network of these two-party ledger entries, it is possible to find a path across the network similar to routing packets on the internet. The nodes along the path are not trusted, as the payment is enforced using a script which enforces the atomicity (either the entire payment succeeds or fails) via decrementing time-locks.

Blockchain as arbiter

As a result, it is possible to conduct transactions off-blockchain without limitations. Transactions can be made off-chain with confidence of on-blockchain enforceability. This is similar to how one makes many legal contracts with others, but one does not go to court every time a contract is made. By making the transactions and scripts parsable, the smart-contract can be enforced on-blockchain. Only in the event of non-cooperation is the court involved – but with the blockchain, the result is deterministic.

Benefits of the lightning network

The lightning networks mesh network brings several benefits to the main chain and allows for better load balancing and facilitate easier day to day transfers. It's said that the lightning network brings bitcoin transfers up to speeds of credit cards and transfer costs are at the satoshi level.

Instant payments

Lightning-fast blockchain payments without worrying about block confirmation times. Security is enforced by blockchain smart-contracts without creating an on-blockchain transaction for individual payments. Payment speed measured in milliseconds to seconds.

Scalability

Capable of millions to billions of transactions per second across the network. Capacity blows away legacy payment rails by many orders of magnitude. Attaching payment per action/click is now possible without custodians.

Cost

By transacting and settling off-blockchain, the Lightning Network allows for exceptionally low fees, which allows for emerging use cases such as instant micropayments.

Cross Blockchains

Cross-chain atomic swaps can occur off-chain instantly with heterogeneous blockchain consensus rules. So long as the chains can support the same cryptographic hash function, it is possible to make transactions across blockchains without trust in 3rd party custodians.

Lightning network wallets

Lightning network-compatible wallets can handle both on-chain and LN chain transactions, and you have the ability to switch between the two, but remember on-chain transactions whether sent or received will require minter confirmation and you will have to pay the higher transaction costs.

LN wallets have their own unique addresses which differ from Bitcoins standard addresses, or it's SegWit addresses. So be sure that you're using the correct address to send and receive your Bitcoin.

There are now over 30 different lightning network compatible wallets; some are open-source some are private projects, some are custodial while others are non-custodial and there is no outright winner in the space yet, so you'll have to pick the one that suits your needs best.

You can find a complete list of lightning wallets here.

Transacting via the Lightning Network

Once you've installed a Lightning Network compatible wallet, it should have both an on-chain Bitcoin wallet and an LN wallet. You can fill your wallet using the standard Bitcoin via a regular alphanumeric address. Once the Bitcoin is confirmed on-chain in your wallet, you can then start to exchange it on the Lightning Network with other LN addresses.

If you want to shut down your payment channel you can always transfer your BTC back into a non-custodial hot wallet or cold storage address

Quick but not so easy

How To Send Money Through Bitcoin Wallet

A path to scalability for Bitcoin will not be easy. Still, it seems as if the open-source community won't give up on the dream that easy, as we've seen with SegWit and SegWit Bech32 reducing cost by 30% already and the lightning network trying to facilitate more considerable scaling.

Transactions may be fast, but it does add a new layer of complexity for the end-user. When we take into consideration lack of education and broader wallet and exchange integration, it's going to take some time for the lightning network to become a substantial part of Bitcoin transaction volume.

We'd love to hear from the lightning network community

Have you made a lightning network transaction before? How did it work out for you? Which wallet option is your favourite? Let us know in the comments section down below.

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Recommended reading

If you enjoyed this post and have a little extra time to dive deeper down the rabbit hole, why not check out the following posts on cryptocurrency and blockchain.

Disclaimer: This article should not be taken as, and is not intended to provide any investment advice and is for educational purposes only. As of the time posting the writers may or may not have holdings in some of the coins or tokens they cover. Please conduct your own thorough research before investing in any cryptocurrency as all investments contain risk.

How To Send Money To My Bitcoin Wallet

Tags: Bitcoin