Running Electrum

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:

1. Select Auto Connect in the first dialog box and click Next.
2. Select Standard wallet and click Next.
3. 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:

1. In the last step, it will ask you for a password, which you can leave empty.
2. 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

1. 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.