We can go to sites like coinbase.org and sign up with our name, email id and phone number. Opening a wallet account is like opening a bank account where we can send, receive and store money in bitcoins.
In Coinbase, we can create multiple wallets which is a great way to organize the record of your expenses and savings. By default, there are following wallets in Coinbase, namely, Bitcoin BTH wallet, Bitcoin Cash BCH wallet, Ethereum ETH Wallet and Litecoin LTC Wallet. You have a wallet in US dollars as well so that you can buy and sell the cryptocurrencies using US dollars.
Each account on Coinbase is a bunch of addresses. New addresses are generated for each transaction on Coinbase automatically and stay mapped with your account forever and it is secure to reuse them.
Each wallet account is associated with an address and QR code as displayed. For example, selecting bitcoin wallet and then clicking on the BTC wallet address shows below address along with its QR code.
We can download bitcoin software client which might take a few hours to download all blocks to our computer that now acts as a node in the network. We have to ensure that there is enough bandwidth and storage for full block chain size which is over 145 GB. It is also possible to use a wallet without downloading the bitcoin client.