After you have downloaded and installed Electrum, open Electrum's testnet mode by running electrum --testnet. When you run Electrum for the first time, it will display the new wallet creation wizard. Follow these steps:
- Select Auto Connect in the first dialog box and click Next.
- Select Standard wallet and click Next.
- Keep selecting Next for each dialog box that appears, until you are asked to save your seed words. Copy them, then reconfirm that you've saved them correctly, as follows:
- In the last step, it will ask you for a password, which you can leave empty.
- Once finished, Electrum will generate a new wallet with plenty of new addresses. Quit the Electrum GUI, and let's continue in CLI mode. We run Electrum as a daemon process, whereby we execute the JSON/RPC commands as following:
electrum --testnet daemon
electrum --testnet daemon load_wallet
- In a new Terminal window, run electrum --testnet listaddresses:
Great, now we have the necessary environment to start transacting with the public bitcoin network. That said, let's discover how a bitcoin transaction is created, exchanged and stored in the blockchain by constructing a bitcoin raw transaction, signing it, and broadcasting it to the network.