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I want to buy bitcoin for the purpose of making a transaction with a business that specified bitcoin. I have a Copay wallet on my desktop, but after doing quite a bit of reading, I'm still not sure about where to go to buy them and how to get them in my wallet. I would be paying with my Visa debit card or through Pay Pal. I've already calculated the amount, which would be 0.025 bitcoin which roughly comes out to $50 US. I know I have to click receive and then to 'request specific account', which takes me to a place where there's a QR code and an address. Not quite sure what the long alpha numeric address is for and about how I purchase the bitcoin and get them into my wallet. I see there is a slower and faster way to do this. Fast is good, but I"m in no particular hurry If you can help, I think that I'm almost there. I"ll keep reading in the interim.

Thanks so much,

John

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  • Forgive me. I see that none of these questions are being answered and in the one I did find, someone at the same basic level got a response about all the research he should have done beforehand. I had no way of knowing that this isn't the place for newbie questions. I will be reading more before asking another quesion. It just seems to me that crucial information is left out on even some of the better tutorials I've read. If this Bitcoin Exchange could write a succinct, step by step explanation about how, exactly to purchase and put the bitcoin in your wallet, more people would use Bitcoin.
    – John Muller
    May 22, 2017 at 5:24

2 Answers 2

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The long alphanumeric address is one of your pseudonymous representations in the Bitcoin network. You may hand it out to your business partner in order to specify where you wish to receive the money.

After you've imparted your address, the sender may create a transaction which is a message to the Bitcoin network that signals his intent to sign over some of his bitcoins to you. This transaction will then be propagated through the network and hopefully incorporated into a block for confirmation. Once the transaction is written to a block, it has become part of the blockchain and the sent amount has been —bar exceptional occurrences— reliably signed over to your wallet.

Since there was really only one piece of information or step missing from your description, I hope that you're well informed at this point. ;)

To get a better overview on some related topics, may I suggest the following topics:

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    Thanks for you concise but comprehensive explanation! It was quite helpful.
    – John Muller
    May 31, 2017 at 9:02
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If you're based in the US, Coinbase and Gemini are two examples of companies that help you purchase Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. using USD.

(Opening an account can be a multi-day process.)

Coins you purchase from them will be placed into a wallet with those respective companies.

To spend bitcoin:

  • find & copy the address (long string of letters/numbers) of the recipient (the seller of goods in this case)
  • in your Coinbase/Gemini wallet start a send transaction, pasting the copied recipient address and specifying a quantity of coin (in your case .025 bitcoin)

That's about it.

A wallet on your PC is not necessary to make transactions. You'll have a wallet from where you purchased the coin and can spend them directly from there.

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