In order to deposit cash to buy Bitcoins, you must generate a “receive” address in your Bitcoin wallet, which gives you a scanable QR code on your phone. Open your Bitcoin wallet and hold your phone with the QR code close to the scan window on the Bitcoin ATM Machine. Sending & Receiving. To send funds from your wallet, you need the recipient’s receive address or QR code. To request, you can share your address or QR code with the sender. Note: your bitcoin and bitcoin cash address will change each time you request but your ether address will stay the same.
More people are starting to use Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies due to their increasing influence in the global landscape. However, as more people venture into the industry, a lot of them struggle to carry out some activities. While they are regarded as primary, these activities are often tough to carry out.
Depositing money into a Bitcoin wallet is easy to do. Luckily, we will discuss the various steps involved in depositing money into your Bitcoin wallet account.
Steps to Depositing Money in a Bitcoin Wallet
This is a complicated question as there is no direct answer to it. In most cases, you cannot deposit money in a Bitcoin wallet. Instead, you can buy Bitcoin from exchanges or other platforms using cash and then load it to your Bitcoin wallet.
Here are the steps to take to achieve it:
Download a Bitcoin wallet
The first step to do is to get a Bitcoin wallet. The Bitcoin wallet you are to acquire can either be a cold storage wallet or a hot wallet. However, we highly recommend using cold storage wallets like Trezor and Ledger due to the higher level of security they offer to users. It is almost impossible to hack cold storage wallets and you can be sure of protecting your coins reserve from malicious actors.
There are several online wallets also available. You can choose from the wide range currently available to you. Some of the online wallets like Luno allow you to deposit the funds and buy Bitcoin from them. However, most of them just store Bitcoin for you.
It is best to have a wallet rather than store your Bitcoin reserve on a cryptocurrency exchange. Over the past decade, billions of dollars have been lost from exchanges as a result of hacks.
Buy Bitcoin from Exchanges
After downloading your Bitcoin wallet, the second step is to use your money to buy BTC from cryptocurrency exchanges or P2P platforms. Cryptocurrency exchanges are the most preferred destination due to their high liquidity. You can easily find buyers and sellers of BTC on the crypto exchanges.
You can try some of the leading cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase, Coinmama, Bittrex, Bitfinex, and more. To purchase BTC from exchanges, you will have to create an account with them. When your account is activated, you can deposit fiat currency. It can be US Dollar or any of the other fiat currencies they accept.
Once you have deposited the funds, proceed to buy BTC using the BTC/USD pair. You will be given the BTC that matches the amount you deposited. Once your cryptocurrency exchange wallet is credited with the BTC, you can transfer it to your Bitcoin wallet for safekeeping.
Transfer to Bitcoin Wallet
When opening your Bitcoin wallet, you will be given a unique code, which is known as your Bitcoin wallet address. The address is what you use to receive BTC from others. Copy the BTC wallet address from your Bitcoin wallet and use it to transfer funds from the cryptocurrency exchange you purchased BTC.
Once you transfer the BTC from the exchange to your wallet, it will reflect within a short period. Keep in mind that the security of your BTC reserve is now in your hands. When using a cold storage wallet, ensure that your private keys remain private and protected at all times. This way, hackers find it immensely impossible to get into your account and steal your funds.
We advise users to backup their wallets so they can easily retrieve their private keys when they misplace or lose it. You can write down the recovery phrase or note on a piece of paper or a notepad and save it in a secure location. You can use the recovery phrase to regain access to your account in case you lose your mobile phone or computer device or it gets stolen.
With the funds now safely in your Bitcoin wallet, you can keep it for future gains or use it to pay for goods and services in the future.
Final Thoughts
Depositing money directly into your Bitcoin wallet is a hard task as most wallets accept only cryptocurrencies. However, you can fund your Bitcoin wallet by purchasing the BTC from cryptocurrency exchanges or peer-to-peer trading platforms and transferring the coins to your wallet afterward. The process is easy and doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes to carry out. The funds will be available in your Bitcoin wallet in no time.
A lot of people have gone through our training on how to make their first purchase of Bitcoin, and then how to use that Bitcoin to buy other specific altcoins.
But there is one last piece to this puzzle missing.
And that is how to add Bitcoin to your offline or hardware wallet.
This step is extremely important.
When you first buy any sort of cryptocurrency, you most likely are using an exchange to do so.
There are other ways to purchase Bitcoin, like using a Bitcoin ATM machine, but 99% of people will be using an exchange to get their hands on this digital gold.
But there is a risk to this.
The Risk Of Leaving Your Bitcoin On An Exchange
The risk is that you are leaving your Bitcoin open to attacks from hackers and thieves.
What you must understand is that when you sign up to an exchange, your account is associated with cryptocurrency public addresses.
This means that you have your own destination that you can share with others to send and receive Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
How to find your public address is pretty much the same for every exchange, so if you know how to find it on one, you’ll easily be able to find it on any other one.
So, as an example, here is how you find your Bitcoin public address on Binance:
You go to the top right corner and hover over “Funds.”
Then click “Balances”.
This then brings you to a page of all of the cryptocurrencies available for purchase on the exchange.
Assuming we want to know our Bitcoin public address, type in “Bitcoin” in the search bar.
Then click “deposit”.
Here is where your Bitcoin public address is.
If you bought Bitcoin through Binance, this is where your Bitcoin would be sent.
If you also bought Bitcoin on another exchange – let’s say Coinbase – and wanted to send it to Binance so you could purchase another cryptocurrency with it, this is the address you would copy and paste to do so.
But there is a problem with this.
The problem is that you only have access to this address: your PUBLIC address.
But you DO NOT have access to your PRIVATE address.
This is why you NEVER want to leave your cryptocurrencies on ANY exchange.
Think of your private address as the password to your bank account – if someone knows what it is, they can simply login in and drain your account.
I’m not saying that anyone at Binance has access to your private key, but what I AM saying is that your private key is stored online.
And YOU don’t even have access to it.
And this is a huge problem.
You should never store your Bitcoin, altcoins, or any other cryptocurrency in a wallet that stores its private key online.
Especially not an exchange wallet.
So what you have to do is deposit your Bitcoins into an offline (hardware) wallet.
The first step in doing so is to actually get yourself a hardware wallet.
Bitcoin Hardware Wallets That Are Safe To Deposit Your Funds
The 3 most popular, highly-praised hardware wallets in terms of safety in adding Bitcoin to are:
These wallets are top of the line and are the highest-security hardware wallets money can buy.
What Information Do I Need To Add Bitcoin To My Hardware Wallet?
Okay, so now you bought a hardware wallet.
Great!
The next step to secure your Bitcoin is to add it to your hardware wallet public address.
The wallet that I personally use is the Ledger Nano S.
So I will use this as an example.
Now, before we get into how to actually do this, let’s understand one thing:
Sending and receiving Bitcoin between wallet addresses is universally the same process.
What I mean by this is that depositing your Bitcoin from your Kucoin exchange wallet to your Trezor wallet is the same process as depositing Bitcoin from your Cex.io wallet to your KeepKey wallet, which is the same process as depositing your Bitcoin from your Coinbase wallet to your Ledger Nano S wallet.
This is because, in every instance, all you need are the same two pieces of information:
- Your login credentials
- The public address of the destination wallet
If you have both of these things, you can successfully add Bitcoin from your online wallet to your offline wallet.
Funding Your Bitcoin Account And Adding It To Your Wallet – The Entire Process
Now it’s time to figure this whole process out.
How do I go from having my money in hand, to buying Bitcoin with it, and then adding that Bitcoin to my wallet?
This is how you do it.
For this example, I’m going to use one of the most popular exchanges and one of the most popular hardware wallets.
We will be taking our Bitcoin from our online Coinbase wallet, and depositing it into our offline Ledger Nano S wallet.
1. Buy Bitcoin On Coinbase.
So, obviously, the first thing you have to do is actually buy the Bitcoin.
There are many places you can buy Bitcoin from, but for the purposes of this example, let’s say we use Coinbase.
We actually have a full, step-by-step walkthrough of exactly how to buy Bitcoin on Coinbase.
We will continue on, assuming you have gone and read this article.
2. Locate Your Ledger Nano S Public Address.
Now that we have actually made our Bitcoin purchase, it is now time to take it off of the exchange and place it in our safe, offline wallet.
To do this, we must find the public address of our hardware wallet.
For the Ledger Nano S, this how you find it:
Go to the Ledger Wallet website and download the Ledger Wallet Bitcoin & Altcoins.
Then, plug in your Ledger Nano S.
When you plug the Ledger Nano S into your computer, this screen will show up:
Here, it will ask you if your Bitcoin address is Segwit or Legacy.
For fear of going too far down the rabbit hole here, simply select “I don’t know” for now.
We will explain the difference between Segwit and Legacy addresses in a future article.
Next you will see this screen.
Click “receive.”
Here, it will display your public Bitcoin address.
This is the wallet address that you will be adding your Bitcoin to.
3. Fund Your Wallet By Depositing The Bitcoin To This Public Address
Now that you have the public address of your destination offline wallet, you have to go to Coinbase and send the Bitcoin to it.
Note that I have bought $100 worth of Bitcoin in order to show you how this transaction works (a little less because of the transaction fees and volatility).
On your Coinbase dashboard, go to “Accounts”.
You’ll see the total amount of Bitcoin in your Coinbase wallet on the left.
We want to send the Bitcoin from this wallet to our Ledger Nano S wallet.
Click “send”.
Here is where you copy and paste your Ledger Nano S public address.
Keep in mind that, as I said, this process is the same for all exchanges.
You simply find the specific cryptocurrency you are trying to fund your offline wallet with, and then click either “send” or “withdraw”.
Most exchanges actually saw “withdraw”.
But the option is the same.
Two areas typically pop up when you do this:
- The destination public address
- The amount you are sending
That’s all the information your have to put it.
You just need to know the public address of the wallet you are funding, and the amount you wish to send.
In this case, I’m just going to send the entire amount.
Click “continue”.
4. Confirm This Transaction Via Email
Depending on the exchange, there may be a verification email sent to you in order to confirm this transaction.
This is simply an added security feature in order to make sure it is actually you that is sending the money.
Once you find this email and click “confirm”, the transaction is final.
Now all you have to do is wait for the funds to be added to your wallet!
This can take anywhere from a couple minutes up to an hour.
So don’t freak out or stress if you don’t see your wallet funded right away!
The funds are on their way and will be deposited shortly.
If you prefer video, here is a great video detailing the steps of transferring bitcoin between wallets:
Adding Bitcoin To Your Wallet: Closing Remarks
And that’s it!
Bitcoin Direct Deposit
You have officially sent, received, and successfully funded your Bitcoin wallet!
That wasn’t so hard, was it?
Admittedly, I was on the edge of my seat the first time I did it, too.
With this whole world being so new to me at the time, it took a while for me to actually summon the courage to actively send my Bitcoin from one place to another.
But after the first few times, I got used to it.
And you will, too!
Just be sure to take your time and follow this guide step-by-step.
Before you know it, you will have safely added your Bitcoin to your offline wallet!
Find My Bitcoin Wallet
Good luck!