Course 03 · Hands onArticle 11/137 min

Sending and receiving

You will be able to receive VIGI, read a transaction before signing it, and know what the wallet is doing with inputs, change and gas.

Receiving

An address is safe to publish; a phrase never is.

The receive screen shows your address as text and as a QR code. Handing it to somebody lets them pay you and nothing else — an address is derived from your public key by hashing, and no amount of it reveals a private key. On testnet the faucet page will send you a small amount so you have something to practise with.

What a payment is made of

Inputs, an output for them, and change for you.

The wallet gathers unspent outputs that add up to at least the amount plus gas, sends one output to the recipient and returns the remainder to a change address it controls. That is why a payment of 1 VIGI can consume 4 and give 2.99 back, and why your history has entries you did not consciously make.

Before you sign

Read the review screen; it is showing you the real thing.

The wallet builds the transaction locally and shows the destination, the amount, the gas and the signing digest before the key is ever used. SafeSign screens what it can and flags what it does not recognise. Reading that screen is the last moment at which a mistake costs nothing — after the signature, the network does exactly what it was told.

After you sign

Broadcast, then confirmation, then it is history.

The signed transaction goes to a node, waits in the mempool and is included in a block. On this network a block arrives roughly every thirty seconds, and a payment is settled once it is in one — you can watch it happen on VigiScan by searching the transaction id the wallet gives you.

In short

  • Your address is safe to share; your phrase never is.
  • Payments consume whole unspent outputs and return change to an address you control.
  • The review screen shows destination, amount, gas and digest before the key signs.
  • A payment settles once it is in a block, and VigiScan will show you that block.