Hi,
So I am totally new to cryptocurrency and Reddit so please forgive any unintentional breaches of etiquette!
Today I have taken my first steps to owning cryptocurrency. I opened a coinbase account, got myself verified and then purchased some litecoin with GBP. As I understand it my litecoin is currently sitting in my exchange wallet.
However, having read up about it it seems that you need to have your own separate wallet. I went to www.litecoin.com and downloaded the wallet for windows. When you select Windows it offers you two 64 bit options:
DOWNLOAD Litecoin Core 0.14.2 for Windows - 64 bit
VALIDATE GPG Signature for this release - 64 bit
I selected the first option and then i porceeded to download a huge file that seemed to make my laptop a node in the litecoin blockchain. It took several hours to download. My first question:
Was this totally necessary for me to have my own wallet? If so, I am unsure how people could have multiple wallets as it needed over 10GB of space.
I wasn’t sure what the second option was (and no advice was given on www.litecon.com) so I clicked on it but couldn’t download it. I began to google search but then found a mass of confusing information regarding gpg configuration, verification and hashing etc etc. However, it did seem to suggest that failure to varify could result in loss of litecoins.
Second question:
Do I need this second download? What does it do?!
And…
Can I move my litecoin from coinbase to my litecoin wallet safely or do I need to do some reading up before I attempt this?
Any help, easy to understand reference links etc would be appreciated.
Merry Christmas!