How to Move Money from Coinbase to Your OWN Wallet

Why you should do this before August 1st.

This tutorial will use Electrum desktop wallet.

Step 1 — Get Electrum

Download Electrum for your OS

Step 2 — Create a wallet

Open Electrum.

Just make a Standard wallet for now.

Keep it simple, just create a standard wallet

Create a new seed

Write down these words! Memorize them!

Write down these 12 words. Memorize them. If you are having trouble memorizing, one technique is to create a story in your mind using the words. It can be a silly story like:

“One day at sea, a man was eating a banana on his sailboat. His seamate and pupil John, who was from the southern region of France, joined him to sell a rug. When they reached their island destination, they had a laugh briefly before heading out. Under the december moon, they detected a problem. While they had earned lots of money but their ship was sinking.

I know the story seems stupid (just made it up on the spot), but research shows that humans are better at remembering stories.

Test out your memorization on the next screen

Encrypt your wallet key

The screen above might seem confusing to you at first. What is this password protecting? Is this the wallet itself?

So your computer has to store the private key in order to send money (since it is used to sign transactions broadcasted on the bitcoin network). If your computer was compromised, you wouldn’t want a hacker to be able to view your private key on your machine; consequently, this password encrypts the private key that is physically stored on your computer.

If you lose this password, it does not mean you lose your coins. You can regenerate your wallet using your private key you wrote down. If you lose/forget that, you will lose your coins.

All done. Notice that there is no coins

Step 3: Transfer money from Coinbase to the wallet you just created.

In Electrum, hit the receive button.

Copy the receiving address. That is a public wallet address that was created with your private key.

Log on to Coinbase and hit Send

Under the Recipient field, paste the receiving address you copied from Electrum earlier.

Double check that you pasted it in correctly! You don’t want to send your money to the wrong address — you can’t undo that!

Fill in the rest

Hit Send Funds

You’re done! Note that electrum will display amounts in mBTC (1 BTC = 1000 mBTC) — so don’t be alarmed if you see 1/1000th of the amount you transferred being displayed. It may also take a minute or so for the transfer to actually show up on Electrum.

Also note it will take up to 20-30 minutes for the transaction to be shown as confirmed on coinbase. Coinbase will wait for a few confirmations before changing the transaction status from PENDING to COMPLETED.

Still Worried/Unsure?

If you are still unsure if you did things right, you can experiment with a very small amount of BTC. You can also try sending it back to a Coinbase public wallet to get familiar/confidence on how things are working.

Hit Accounts

Hit wallet address

And a QR code with a public address below will show up. Copy that public address and go back to Electrum. Click Send.

Under Pay to, paste in the wallet address. The description is optional. Adjust the slide for how quickly you’d like the transaction to be confirmed. A general guide is that each block takes about 8-10 minutes.

That’s it! Hope this guide was helpful.

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