There are a lot of doubts on how to start with a IOTA wallet (we are talking about cryptocurrencies here). So I wrote this quick guide which got me started, sharing it with you all as it might also help you:
1 – Download the official IOTA wallet from GitHub: https://github.com/iotaledger/wallet/releases
2 – Once installed, you will be prompted for your seed, this is a very long unique generated string of letters and number 9, this is basically your wallet so keep it in a safe place and dont share it with anybody.
You can generate your seed:
– On Mac: open Terminal and paste: cat /dev/urandom |LC_ALL=C tr -dc ‘A-Z9’ | fold -w 81 | head -n 1
– On Linux: cat /dev/urandom |tr -dc A-Z9|head -c${1:-81}
Source: https://iotasupport.com/gui-newseed.shtml (Not an official IOTA website I understand). No clue how to generate a seed on Windows to be honest, if you find a safe way please share it so I can update this post.
3 – Once your seed has been generated paste it on the wallet and wait a bit. Then you should see a “Balance 0” once its ready to send or receive funds.
You can receive IOTA’s by generating a Receive address and by attaching it to the Tangle (similar to blockchain). Make sure you see the “Address Attached” message before doing anything with it.
4 – You can check this video for an overall view on how it looks, the only thing that didn’t work for me from this video is how he generated the seed.
5 – More information on IOTA and what makes it so special, check the IOTA FAQ official website: http://learn.iota.org/faqs
6 – If you want to start with transactions you need to use Binance.com or Bitfinex.com. Maybe in the future other traders start working with it too.
You will need to buy a main Crypto currency like Bitcoin or Etherum to be able to trade it for IOTA.
Note: No, you cannot mine IOTA 🙂