What exactly do I need to do so that a person can send bitcoin to me?

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A main way that a person can send bitcoin to you is “through the chain”.

A second way that a person might be able to send bitcoin to you is through “bitcoin Lightning”.  This “Lightning” only works if you have an account with some bitcoin exchange that supports Lightning, and it only works if the person who wants to send you the bitcoin is using a bitcoin exchange that also supports Lightning.

A person who sends bitcoin to you “through the chain” can send it to you at your account at an exchange (if you have such an account, and if you choose to use it as your way of receiving the transfer).

Most often what you would probably prefer to do is receive the bitcoin “into your hardware wallet”.  This means that the entire transaction happens in a way that most people cannot see.  It is not completely secret and anonymous, but it is mostly secret and mostly anonymous.

Here are some of the pros and cons of these three ways to receive bitcoin:

Being smart about how to receive the bitcoin.  When you are getting ready to receive some bitcoin from somebody, one of the things that you must do is provide an “address” to that person.  When you are doing this, you could use the same address over and over again.  But it is considered a best practice and is highly recommended to use a new address for each bitcoin transfer.  It does not cost more money to create and use a new address.  And it protects your financial privacy and, to a lesser extent, your security. 

It turns out that bad people will try to infect the sender’s smart phone or computer or web browser with malware that will try to intercept such outbound bitcoin.  So you need to beg the sender to be really careful whenever they are sending bitcoin to you.  Check carefully at your end to make absolutely sure you know your “address” that the other person is going to use to sent the bitcoin to you.  When the sender is entering the “address” to into their phone or computer, beg them to read it back to you, so that you can make absolutely sure the address is what it is supposed to be.

Fun feature in some hardware wallets.  As discussed above, a very important part of receiving bitcoin on the chain is paying very close attention to the “address” that the sender uses to send the bitcoin to you.  The wallet itself will determine the address, and will communicate it to the app that is running on your smart phone or notebook computer.   One of the things to worry about is the possibility that somehow your smart phone or notebook computer might have been compromised in some way, perhaps with a bad person sneaking their own “address” onto the screen of smart phone or computer.  So you are reminded to check to make sure the “address” shown on the wallet itself matches the “address” shown in the app.

Having said all of this, I will now try to describe the fun feature provided by some hardware wallets (including the Trezor Safe 7).  At the moment that the address appears on the wallet, you can tap to make the wallet display the address as a QR code.  Depending on whether the sender is in the same room with you or not, it might work out that the sender could simply scan the QR code from your wallet.  If so, then this greatly reduces the risk of something going wrong with the address.

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