Up and Running with Peercoin - 03 Setting Up Wallet - YouTube

Once you've installed your

client, you should have it available on your

computer system. Mine,

on Windows 7, is C

drive, Program Files x86

and PPCoin. So if you go to that you can,

or just from the start menu, find the application, and it's called ppcoin-qt.exe.

So I'm going to run that

and the first thing that will happen

is it's going to try and connect to the network, so make sure your firewall is

going to let it go onto the Internet. And what it will try and do is

update its status to find all the blocks that have

happened so far. I don't really know what that means but I think it basically means that

it's going to make it up to date with all the transactions that

happened with Peercoin so far.

So, in this bottom right-hand corner, you'll see at the moment it says 0 active

connections. If you scroll over it, it says 0 active connections.

So hopefully in a second, when it sorts itself out, it will be able to access the

Internet and the network and then it will start downloading all the blocks that

it hasn't been able to download so far.

So once the

software application has access to the Internet, you'll see in the bottom right-hand corner

that there's now 2 active connections to the network

and this is scrolling to say that it's syncing all the blocks of

transaction history. So that does take like a really really long time. As you see here,

on my client the last received block was generated for 442 days ago. So it's

going to now

try and sync those up to the correct point in time.

And you can see here, there's a warning saying checkpoint is too old, wait for the block

chain to download or notify

the developers of the issue. This is really normal and

it does take a hell of a long time, so I'm going to pause the video and wait for it to happen

but don't worry if it takes, like

an hour or two hours because that's how long it took me

last time I did it. OK, so I'll be back in a sec.. or an hour.. or so..

OK, so I just thought I'd update on what's going on with my client at the

moment. If I scroll over here

you can see that there's only 25 days of

block transaction history to download

left and it's 94% done. So I just thought I'd show you,

if you go to your user directory

on your computer, in my case my user is

actually called user, so it's C:\Users

\user and then there's an Appdata folder. In there, there's a roaming folder

and in there the software will have created a folder called PPCoin.

And that's what I'm looking at now. And as you can see, when it's downloading

all this block history

this file here, is getting bigger and bigger.

So hopefully, this

won't be too much longer now. It's on 95%, 19 days to go.

The other thing that you'll find in this folder

is probably the most important, well it IS the most important file, which is this

wallet.dat file. And that's what's going to contain your private

key, which will identify your wallet

and will be the way that you are able to keep

your coins. So the most important thing to do is to make sure that you don't

lose or overwrite this file becuase if you do

then you won't be able to have access to any coins that you've managed to generate

or have bought. So it's really important to

make sure that you're protecting this wallet.dat file

and back it up on an external drive or somewhere else

or some other computer. So just having another look..

Hopefully this won't be too much longer to go.

There we go.

So when it's done you'll get this warning gone from the bottom left-hand corner

and you'll get a tick to say, when you scroll over it,

sorry hover it, it'll say that it's

today. So now we can have a look around. As I mentioned you've got your

wallet file

in your Appdata directory

Appdata\Roaming\PPCoin

There it is. But to secure it, you can see, this is your wallet, you've got

balance, stake is the amount that you can make from this

proof-of-stake thing which I'll go into at some other point

But an important thing, that I like to do is to encrypt the wallet straight away.

Which will mean that to send any coins to anyone else, you'll have to

input a password. So just go to settings, encrypt wallet

and then put in a new password.

Nice and long, I'll just do a short one for now because I'm just doing it as a demo

And there we go. Now it does give you a warning

obviously if you lose your password you'll lose your ability to send coins and do

things with your wallet, so make sure that you're going to remember your wallet.

OK, so when it's done it'll come up with this message

and it means that you're going to re-start the client

So to do that, go back to wherever it is your client is

or from the start menu if you've got that set up.. ppcoin..

Going to start it up again..

And there we go. You'll now have

an icon of a lock and it'll say the wallet is encrypted and currently locked

Here it says that we're up to date. Because

we've got all the blocks that we need. So now we're a lot safer. We've got the wallet

and it's encrypted with a password.

If you want to back up your wallet, you can just click on file,

,backup wallet

and then choose somewhere that you want to back it up, like somewhere secure. I'm just going to

put it on the desktop for now

but I'll show you how to do that with TrueCrypt at some point.

So you can call it, I don't know, wallet_backup

and I'm just going to save it there.

And you'll notice, in the bottom left-hand corner it says minting suspended due to

locked wallet.

Again, I'll go into how you can use this client to

mint coins, just by holding coins.

But for now, that's probably enough. I've gone through the wallet and then

next, we'll go through how to do other things with your

wallet and your Peercoins.