“Crypto Wallet Headaches”

Last week I restored my digital wallet on my new phone using my 12-word password provided by my Bitpay wallet app. On my previous blog, I wanted to go through my process of restoring my wallet in order to use my funds again. I believe learning how to use these apps or products within the crypto world is important because many have gone through bad experiences when it comes to cryptocurrency, the worst one would be to lose your funds because you forgot your password. Although its commonly said that from mistakes we learn well when it comes to keeping your money safe I think no one wants to make a mistake; so let's hope everyone gets it right at the first time. I must admit that in my case it's easier because when I've had issues with understanding something or even downloading a product, I work with people that do.

I wanted to restore my digital wallet because I wanted to create my first account exchange. Thus I created an account on a well-known exchange in Chile named Buda. You can easily sign up on their website. I was asked for a series of personal data, including my ID number and the serial number to verify its existence. Although I received an email saying it would take 48 hours to confirm my account, it took about 2 hours to obtain an approval message. Their web, at first sight, seems pretty self-explanatory and user-friendly, which I believe should be one of the most essential things in the crypto environment, making apps and programs that can be simply used by anyone with a little bit of knowledge on the subject. Next week I will explore the Chilean exchange and see how it works.

In order to transfer your crypto, you must open the app (in this case Bitpay)and select your personal wallet this will show you how much crypto you have and a history of transactions like a bank ledger named Activity. You will also see a receive and send button.

In my case, I wanted to send all my funds to my account on Buda. After pressing the send button you have to search or enter a bitcoin address, the easiest way is just clicking on the right side icon so you can scan the address you want your money transferred.

Once you do this it will let you either send your maximum amount available to send or write a specific amount. I didn't notice it at first, but in this part of the transaction in the top left side of the screen it shows by default BTC, and therefore you must enter the value in that specific currency, but you can press it, and the value changes to USD which is much easier for me because its a currency I feel more familiar with.

Finally, it takes you to a tab where the total amount sent appears and the value of your miner fee. Remember miner fees are paid to process your transaction.

This was also tricky because I did not know I was able to change the mining fee to this:

The type of fee chosen will determine how fast your transaction goes through, the less you pay, the more you wait, the app also provides you with an estimated time expect.

Then you slide to pay; on your activity, this money will appear deducted even though the person still has not received the payment, this will depend on the miner fee priority.

Unfortunately, when I slid the bar to finish the transaction, a message asking me to introduce a password appeared. A shock to me because I had never generated a password for this wallet aside from receiving a 12 letter password the wallet gives you the first time you set it up. I tried remembering if I ever put a password, looked at some notebooks, but I was always pretty sure that I had never put one. We looked at this with some coworkers, and one of them suggested to restore the wallet again and go through the step. Headache right? So I did and yes... when I reset my Bitpay wallet a messaged appeared:

When I restored the wallet the first time, I saw this and pressed yes, because why wouldn't I want to protect my wallet. The problem was that I was never asked to introduce a password or created one when I first downloaded the app. The app assumed I had a password that was never made, thus when I wanted to finalize a transaction I was asked for a password that did not exist. These are some glitches on the wallet that have to be worked on. In my case I did not panic because the number of funds I had were to play around with and learn how to transfer crypto, but once I mentioned this to my boss, he freaked out. I'm pretty sure anyone with a significant amount of money on their digital wallet would panic if they came across this or any glitch.

Once I restored my wallet again choosing not have a password I was able to go on my personal wallet and make the transfer to my Buda account.

Keep in mind that things like this happen. Most crypto apps have glitches and eventually get fixed. That's why it's important to play around with the apps, and I would recommend to try and make some test transfers at first. We did this with my co-workers and my boss, and we were able to see what not do while we were doing test transfers.

Hope you enjoyed it, feel free to comment.