You do not need money, an account, an ID or a bank. You need a phone and twenty minutes. At the end of it you will have received a payment and sent one — and you will know what everybody else is talking about.
This is a trial run. What you set up here is a practice wallet. Do not put anything into it that would hurt to lose — a few cents is the point. The serious version, with a proper backup, comes afterwards and takes another hour.
A wallet is an app that holds your keys on your own device. That is the whole difference to an account: nobody else can open it, and nobody else can close it.
Two you can start with:
| If you want to | Use |
|---|
|---|---|
| just arrive | Natrium — natrium.io, Android and iPhone, does one thing and does it right |
|---|---|
| start properly right away | NanChat — nanchat.com, wallet and messages in one, and it can swap |
Install it, choose new wallet, not "restore".
The app will now show you twelve to twenty-four words. For this trial run, skip past them. You will come back to them later, and then they matter more than anything else on this page.
Open Receive in the app. You will see a long address starting with nano_ and a square code.
Two ways to put something into it:
mail, however. A few cents is plenty.
can try exactly this. Search for nano faucet; nanodrop.io has been doing it for years.
A faucet asks for your address. Never for your words. Any site that asks for your recovery words is stealing from you — there is no exception to this, ever, anywhere.
Watch the app while it arrives. That is the part nobody forgets.
Now the other direction. Open Send, paste the address you got it from, enter the amount, confirm.
Three things to notice, because they are the reason this book and this site exist:
|---|---|
| It is there in about one second | not "pending", not "1 of 3 confirmations" — done |
|---|---|
| It cost nothing | not "low fees". Nothing. The amount that left is the amount that arrived |
| Nobody approved it | there was no bank, no business hours, no country, no limit |
You need somewhere for it to go. Any of these works, and none of them needs permission from anybody:
|---|---|
| Back to the faucet | nanodrop.io — then the next person gets it. The tidiest option |
|---|---|
| To someone who has a wallet | a friend, another country, two in the morning. This is the one that shows you what actually changed |
| Buy something with it | the We ❤ Nano door sign at the auction — it opens at 0.00001 XNO, a tenth of what a faucet hands out, so what you just received is already enough to bid. Disclosure: I run that auction house |
| To me | symbolic support, and no obligation whatsoever — later, gladly more |
If you want to send it to me, or simply write to me, this is the address:
nano_1xa9u4t8mcatg54brd6mj46yi4unhaye4eid8xjp61z9hbm7jx8mn51uffre
>
The same address works for messages in NanChat (
nanchat.com) — wallet and chat are the same thing there, so you can just write to it.
Send it back and forth a few times. Try an amount so small that no bank would process it. That is the point at which most people understand what is different here.
If it goes wrong, nothing happens. Delete the app, start again. That is what this trial run is for — mistakes cost nothing today and everything in six months.
When you want to do it properly, the order is: write the words on paper, store them in two places, and prove the backup works by restoring it on a second device. That last step is the one nearly everybody skips, and it is the only one that cannot be caught up later.
The book walks through all of it, step by step, in about ninety minutes.