The objective of this course block is to gain a general understanding of BTCPay Server software. In a shared environment, it’s recommended to follow the instructor’s demonstration and refer to the BTCPay Server Coursebook to follow along with the teacher. You will learn how to create a wallet through multiple methods. Examples include Hot wallet setups and hardware wallets connected through BTCPay Server Vault. These objectives occur in the Demo environment, displayed and given access to by your course instructor.

If you follow this course by yourself, you can find a list of third-party hosts for Demo purposes at https://directory.btcpayserver.org/filter/hosts. We strongly advise against using these third-party options as production environments; however, they serve the right purpose for introducing the use of Bitcoin and BTCPay Server.

As a BTCPay Server rockstar trainee, you might have previous experience setting up a Bitcoin node. This course is specifically tailored to the BTCPay Server Software stack.

Many of the options in BTCPay Server exist in some form or another in other Bitcoin Wallet-related software.

As you are welcomed to the Demo environment, you are asked to ‘Login’ or ‘Create your account.’ Server administrators may disable the feature of creating new accounts for security reasons. BTCPay Server logos and button colors can be changed because BTCPay Server is Open Source Software. A Third-party host can White-label the software and change the entire look.

Creating accounts on BTCPay Server requires valid Email address strings; [email protected] would be a valid string for Email.

The password needs to be at least 8 characters long, including letters, numbers, and characters. After setting the password once, you will have to verify that the password is the same as what was typed in the first password field.

When both the Email and Password fields are properly filled in, click on the ‘Create Account’ button. This will save the Email and password on the instructor’s BTCPay Server instance.

If you follow this course independently, creating this account would likely be done on a third-party host; therefore, we again emphasise that these should not be used as production environments, but only for training purposes.

The Administrator of the BTCPay Server Instance can also create accounts for BTCPay Server. The Administrator of the BTCPay Server instance can click on ‘Server Settings’ (1), click on the ‘Users’ tab (2), and click the “+ Add User” button (3) in the top right of the Users tab. In Objective (4.3), you will learn more about the administrator control of Accounts.

As an administrator, you would need the user’s Email address and set a standard password. It is recommended that the Administrator inform the user to change this password before using the account for security reasons. If the Administrator does not set a Password and SMTP has been configured on the server, the user will receive an email with an invitation link to create their account and set a password themselves.

When following the course with an instructor, follow the link provided by the instructor and create your account on the Demo environment. Ensure your email address and password are saved securely; you will need these login credentials for the rest of the demo objectives in this course.

Your instructor may have gathered the email address upfront and sent an invitation link before this exercise. If instructed, check your Email.

When taking the course without an instructor, create your account using the BTCPay Server demo environment; go to

https://mainnet.demo.btcpayserver.org/login.

This account should only be used for demonstration/training purposes and never for business.

In this section, you learned the following:

Give reasons why using a Demo Server is a bad idea for production purposes.