Install MetaMask to Use as a Test Network to Store Sensitive Information
We will download MetaMask, set up an account, and copy your private key for use in the next lessons. We'll also briefly learn about the structure of a browser-based non-custodial wallet.
Non-custodial wallets are wallets where no other party holds any private information about it. This makes it very powerful — in that you have 100% control over what goes on in your wallet. But it also means you are ENTIRELY responsible. There is no do-over button, no password reset, and no support agent to help you out should you go down the wrong path.
Instructor: [0:00] For the next step, you'll want to actually deploy this to a test network. In order to do that, we're going to want to generate some private keys. Once you start doing that, it really helps to have an app that does and holds a lot of this information for you and makes it easy to grab. [0:20] To do that, we use MetaMask. You'll want to go to metamask.io. Then you can go to download. You can either download it for Chrome, iOS, or Android. They also have Firefox and Edge as well. This MetaMask is a browser extension. Here you can see that it will bring you to a interface that looks very similar to this.
[0:47] You will want to setup your MetaMask account, and we'll walk through a simple installation. It will give you a couple of key pieces of information. The most important of which is going to be your seed phrase.
[1:01] Your seed phrase is a multiword long between 12 and 24 is usually the amounts. It is a 12-word long seed phrase. This seed phrase is the most important aspect of security whenever you are dealing with crypto wallets.
[1:22] Your seed phrase will be used to recover your wallet if you forget your password for here, or if you wanted to generate all of these accounts somewhere else, you would also use your seed phrase for that. Your seed phrase is like the source of truth for all the different accounts that you have.
[1:41] For all of these, you can see that you can have many accounts attached. For all of these different accounts that I have, all of these use the same seed phrase. Here, you can see here's one. It generated. Here's the public key for this account.
[2:00] If I go to this account, and I go to settings...Actually, I don't want to go to settings. I want to go to account details. You look at the account details. Here's account three. We'll call this Egghead test. Awesome. We see that this is our public key. You could scan this QR code. It would show you a public key as well.
[2:26] If you want to export your private key, you can generate multiple accounts. They can all have different public keys and private keys public. All of those are connected to your seed phrase. You don't want to share that ever for any reason. You want to write it down. You don't want to put it in an email. You want to write it down somewhere safe and put that in there.
[2:54] Here, you can see that I'm showing you this private key because I don't care if you know this private key. What I care about is that you know my seed phrase so I won't be showing you that. I know that I may be going a little bit hard on this. Never share your private keys or your seed phrase with anyone for any reason unless you want to give them all of your money permanently.
[3:18] You cannot change your seed phrase. You cannot reset your private key password. It's a very different paradigm than you may be used to like for email or something. This is very, very important. I want to stress this to you.
[3:30] I don't want you to be a victim of sharing this to some scammer that convinced you that like, "Hey, I need this particular piece of information." There is no reason that anyone ever needs your private key or your seed phrase to help you out.
[3:45] With this private key, we have this. Now, we have a nice key management solution that will live here.