Mycelium User Guide

We at Bitcoin miners UK rate the Mycelium as the best Bitcoin wallet for the mobile, we love its functionalities, relatively ease of use, privacy and security features. We have put together this user guide for you to help you get to grips with Mycelium and to make sure you have everything covered.

Our guide will walk you through the steps to creating and securing a Mycelium Wallet on your android phone and/or tablet; and how to receive and send payments.

What is a Bitcoin wallet?

Bitcoin wallets are software programs or applications that let you use the Bitcoin payment network or blockchain as it is commonly referred to as. In the same was as you need an email application such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail to send and receive e-mail, you will need a Bitcoin wallet to send and receive Bitcoin.

A Bitcoin wallet manages your Bitcoin private keys and addresses; with a wallet, you can spend and store your Bitcoins.

A Bitcoin address, which is associated with your Bitcoin balance is your identity on the Bitcoin network. The private key enables you to spend Bitcoins from that address.

Private keys and Bitcoin addresses can both be represented either as a string of numbers and letters or as a QR code. A Bitcoin wallet is an interface you use to access the Bitcoin network.

Take note: Being an owner of Bitcoins means being in possession of their associated seed or private key, you ought to always make a backup of your wallets seed, just in case you lose access to your wallet by losing your phone, password or for whatever other reason. You can do this by simply writing it on a piece of paper or safely on your computer. Seed normally consist of a string of randomly generated words

First Step: Create your wallet Go to Google Play Store, download Mycelium Wallet. When Mycelium has finished downloading and installing, go to the home screen and open it.

Your wallet is now ready for immediate use, but we strongly suggest you secure it and do the following:

Second Step: Set up and secure your wallet Protect against theft with a PIN code First, go to settings (found in the top right corner by clicking the vertically stacked three small squares) Select “set pin code” Set the pin and make sure you do not forget it, without this, you cannot spend your Bitcoin and/or access your master recovery seed! The next time you want to make a transaction or change important settings, this screen will appear: Protect your wallet! Just in case you lose the phone or PIN number Now your wallet is protected with a pin code you need to back it up Click on the three small squares in the top right corner and choose backup

Enter the pin code to get access to the recovery phrase The wallet will display twelve generated words, one at a time. You will be asked to write down the 12 words, take your time to ensure you’ve written them down correctly.

Attention! - You won't be able to take a screenshot and never write those words on a computer and definitely not on an email!

Anyone who gets access to these words can get access to your Bitcoins!

You will then be asked to input the words again, to ensure you wrote them down correctly!

What if I lose my phone or password?

In the event of your phone being stolen or lost your Bitcoins can't be spent without your PIN number. However, an experienced hacker could crack the PIN code relatively easily. If you think this is a likely outcome make sure to promptly follow the next steps. Do NOT panic! If you lost your pin number and you have your 12 words written down, simply just uninstall Mycelium and then download and reinstall it again. If you’ve lost your phone you will need to get a new Android device and re-install MyCelium. When you open Mycelium for the first time, you will be asked if you would like to create a new wallet or recover a wallet. Select the recover wallet option, you will be asked to enter your twelve-word recovery phrase and then your wallet (and all your available Bitcoins) will be restored!

Third Step: Receiving Bitcoins

Receiving Bitcoin Payments

To receive a payment go to the Balance tab and click “Receive”. (Not required) Request the amount by selecting the keyboard icon under “Optional Amount” Share your Bitcoin address with the sender by doing either of the following: Getting the sender to scan your QR code Sharing your address with them by “Copy to Clipboard” and pasting into a message or the “Share Bitcoin Address” giving various sharing options available to you. Get the sender to send the payment. You can now check you have received the payment by selecting the Transactions tab. Attention! - You cannot send the funds you’ve just received until you receive one confirmation which takes approximately ten minutes. Although, once the payment has been made and it’s showing, don’t worry it will clear as it cannot be reversed :-).

Fourth Step: Sending Bitcoin Payments.

To make a payment go to the Balance tab and select “send”.

You can now do either of the following:

-Scan the recipient QR code using “Scan QR Code” which is the most convenient and quickest option, or,

-Paste a Bitcoin address using “Clipboard”, or,

-Manually enter their Bitcoin address using “Manual Entry”.

Once you have input their address go on to enter the amount you wish to send by selecting the keyboard icon under “Enter Amount”,

-You can choose the following currencies to make the payment in: BTC (Bitcoin), USD (US DOLLAR), CAD (CANADIAN DOLLAR), GBP (GREAT BRITISH POUND) by clicking on the currency displayed in the top right corner.

–ATTENTION! - If you’re making an online payment to someone; the amount to send will often be automatically entered when scanning a QR code of the merchant. If this is to be the case, do not alter the amount. Aim to always know from the merchant the amount of Bitcoin he wants to receive, not a number of Dollars or Euros he or she wants to receive. If you have any questions about the amount being sent, contact them about it before making a payment!

Once you are happy with the amount, click on “Ok” to go back to the payment screen. Confirm the information is correct and then click “Send”. Enter your PIN number to confirm the payment and you are done! You can now check your transactions under the Transactions button.

Advanced Features of Mycelium:

One reason why we love Mycelium is the many features it has; especially as mobile Bitcoin wallets are concerned!

Cold Storage:

To keep your Bitcoins even safer, make use of cold storage! You can spend Bitcoins held in cold storage with Mycelium if they are a paper backup or a slip from a Bitcoin ATM machine, xPRIV Key, Master Seed, and Private Key formats are supported. And once the transaction has been made, all traces of it will then be erased from the internal memory.

Importing an HD Public Key:

Many people have asked,Why would anyone want to import an HD public key into Mycelium? The answer to that is it can help you track the balance of your other Bitcoin wallets. For example, let’s suppose you use Electrum on your laptop or desktop computer and want to be able to monitor your balance from your mobile? Simply import the HD public key from Electrum into Mycelium. The other great thing with this is that you can also import HD public keys from a hardware wallets such as TREZOR or Ledger. This makes monitoring your balance or receiving Bitcoin payments to your cold storage device easy!

To add an HD account, go to the “Accounts” tab and press the key icon in the top right corner.

Local Trader

Mycelium offers a great feature for buying and selling Bitcoin; Mycelium Local Trader helps match you up with other Bitcoin buyers and sellers in your local area. If you have people nearby (very likely if you live in or near a city) this makes it double easy to buy and / or sell Bitcoin with cash! To activate Local Trader, select the three dots in the top right corner and then select “Settings” and make sure the “Disable Local Trader” checkbox is left unchecked!

Using Mycelium with Tor

One great thing about Mycelium is the advanced privacy settings and the big one it has which very few do is its ability to work with TOR. Mycelium lets its users route their traffic through Tor. This is particularly useful because the Mycelium wallets pulls blockchain transaction data from their central servers; whilst Mycelium claims not to log IP addresses, there is no way to be sure. However, by using Orbot (the Android version of Tor), you can be certain there is no way Mycelium has access to your IP address. To make use of this feature, download Orbot from the Google play store, once installed, go back to Mycelium settings page and select the option “Use Tor network (external tor)”. This is probably a little beyond the scope of this guide, however, if there is anything you would like to know about this feature, please Contact Us and we will be happy to add any unanswered questions into this guide or at least point you in the right direction for help in further areas of this.

Further Settings:

Mycelium is jam-packed with features, without needing a PhD in physics to operate it, here is an outline of the other options and features:

Languages – There are 22 different language options.

Currencies – There are over 160 different currency settings, even Gold and Silver troy ounce! Which is quite astounding considering this is a mobile app!

Exchange Source – There are 11 exchanges to choose from to get your exchange rates; Bitstamp, QuadrigaCX, BTC-e, Kracken, BTC China, Coinbase, BitPay, BitcoinAverage, Bitfinex, Anxpro and Coinapult are all available .

Denomination – BTC, mBTC, uBTC and bits are all options in Mycelium.

Miner Fee – This will usually be set to Normal which is the option I go with, however, you can choose between Low-priority, Economic, Normal or Priority. If speed is essential, if you are trading with people and need to be quick then maybe give Priority a try, but it's not essential as far as we are concerned.

Block Explorers – There are 12 different block explorers to choose from, a Block explorer is essentially a web-based service where you can look up transaction details, it will be set to blockchain.info by default, and that's fine with us.

PIN Settings – Here you can Clear your current PIN code, Set a PIN code (if you haven’t already) or select Require PIN on Start which will add some extra security to your wallet (We advise you to choose this)

Multi Signature Wallet - There is no Multi Signature feature to Mycelium, but that's it and it probably won't be long, however, if you want multi-signature Bitcoin wallets, you are probably best keeping that to your desktop and using Armory. (we will be covering Armory very soon!)

Conclusion

We hope this has been helpful to you and if you have any questions please do contact us, input from our readers is very important as it will assist us making our articles more useful to all our readers.