After you set up a command line Monero wallet, you have to run the Monero-wallet-cli program.
How to check your balance
[wallet 47CL7F]: balance
Balance: 0.300000000000, unlocked balance: 0.300000000000
The balance command will show you your Monero balance, and you can see that in the example above, the wallet contains 0.3 Monero. If you just received a payment, you will have to wait about 20 minutes until that payment becomes unlocked before it’s practically confirmed. You will not be able to spend your Monero until the payment becomes unlocked.
Before anything else, it’s highly important that you make sure your Monero daemon runs and successfully syncs with the network. Your Monero wallet won’t be able to see its balance and new payments that it received unless the Monero daemon will be correctly synced to the network.
How transactions are sent and the required time to be completed
When a user sends Monero to your wallet, the Monero network will include that transaction in a Monero block. A block describes a record of a batch of transactions that have been announced to the Monero node network.
The blocks are mined which means that they are verified in a distributed way across the network of Monero miners.
The necessary time to mine a block in the network is 2 minutes, and after the mining is complete, it means that it’s successful and the result will be a confirmation. Ten confirmations are required, and only then a transaction will be considered as verified. Overall, it takes about 20 minutes for a Monero transaction to be completely verified and funds available to be spent in a subsequent transaction.
Early notifications of received payments
A Monero wallet will automatically notify you with a message about an incoming transaction after it has received only a single confirmation from the network. The very first block will require about 2 minutes until it gets confirmed and your wallet will afterwards scan the network every 90 seconds to check for updates.
The process of confirming blocks involves statistical probabilities, and the first block could be confirmed faster or slower than the average time of 2 minutes. The whole confirmation process may take up to 10 minutes or even longer in some cases until the first block is confirmed. After a payment is sent, you will need to wait for a maximum of about 12 minutes until the wallet first notifies you of the transaction.
The first notification that you get (the one before the 20 minutes final confirmation) is a sign that things are going as they should. On the other hand, you will always have to wait for the ten confirmation period in order to know that you are completely safe and your transaction has not been reversed/double spent by a rogue sender.
Zero confirmation notifications
A zero confirmation transaction means that a transaction has been announced to the Monero network, but it has not been verified even once. It’s recommended that you never rely on such kind of zero confirmation notifications, but they are beneficial for confirming that the sender has begun the process of sending a payment to your Monero wallet.
You have to type the following command into your wallet, to see zero confirmation notifications:
[wallet 47CL7F]: show_transfers pool
Asking someone to send you Monero
In order to be able to see your public wallet address, you will have to type the following command into the wallet:
[wallet 47CL7F]: address
After you see your address, you have to tell it to the sender so that they can send you Monero.
Asking for Monero, and specifying a payment ID
If there are more people who are sending you Monero, it will be difficult to know who sent what amount. This problem can be solved by generating a unique payment ID to tell the person that is sending you Monero. An integrated address has to be generated which combines your public Monero address with a newly generated payment ID. To be able to do this, all you have to do is type the following into your network:
[wallet 47CL7F]: integrated_address
Random payment ID: <9e5d624026c5c274>
Matching integrated address: 4Gu184XsVma17VjzWt9Zse8Z8URhaHaA2L9jJq6rrLtDhiYK9PfbCavhhMKws9xEdKHBeGcQtJmPt4uEMivooNztHViznm8GhvREB6AU3C
After that, all you have to do is tell the sender your integrated address and only then, they will be able to send you Monero. In order to view a list of payments received along with their unique payment IDs, you will have to type the following:
[wallet 47CL7F]: show_transfers
In order to only view payments that have been received using a particular ID, you have to use the following command while substituting the example payment ID with your very own:
Sending Monero to someone else
In order to send 0.1 Monero to someone else, for instance, you will need the public address or an integrated one. After that, you have to type the following:
[wallet 47CL7F]: transfer 4Gu184XsVma17VjzWt9Zse8Z8URhaHaA2L9jJq6rrLtDhiYK9PfbCavhhMKws9xEdKHBeGcQtJmPt4uEMivooNztHViznm8GhvREB6AU3C 0.1
Basically, the command should be typed as a single line with a space between the recipient’s address and the amount of the payment that you want to send to their wallet.