Bitcoins are one of the most valued assets in today’s time. Therefore special care needs to be taken when it comes to protecting the Bitcoins you have. It’s important.
Talking about Bitcoin safety, you need to keep the private key associated with your wallet protected. We have already discussed the private key and other Bitcoin terminology here.
Let’s understand what a Bitcoin Paper Wallet is.
What’s Bitcoin Wallet?
A Bitcoin Paper Wallet is a type of hardware wallet. In this wallet, the private key and the public key information are printed on a piece of paper.
Different sources create Bitcoin Paper Wallet and if printing your Bitcoin wallet private key on a piece of paper does not sound safe to you, there are sources which incorporate your private key on to a physical coin rather than printing it on paper.
Once the Bitcoin Paper Wallet is generated, you then have to store the paper wallet safely like a commodity.
This is because as the wallet has your Bitcoin wallet private key printed onto it, anyone with access to your private key can easily do transactions using your Bitcoins.
Bitcoin Paper Wallet is for single-use. But even though multiple transactions can be done using the same Bitcoin Paper Wallet but it’s not recommended.
How To Create A Bitcoin Paper Wallet?
Before we take you through the steps required to create a Bitcoin Paper Wallet, below are some points that you should be aware of.
- Both the private key and public key will be available in QR as well as text form. The QR form can be used to scan and directly perform transactions using Bitcoins. Alternatively, you can also note down the text of your public and private key and then use it as per your convenience as well.
- To initially create the Paper Wallet, your web browser has to be used, and it can be any web browser. Even though the key is generated within the browser and not the internet, it is safe to delete all the browser data once you create the paper wallet, to be safe.
- As mentioned earlier, once a Paper Wallet is generated, proper care should be taken to protect the paper wallet so that your wallet address and private key does not go into any other hands.
There are many paper wallet generators out there to create a Bitcoin Paper Wallet easily. For the sake of this tutorial, we will be creating the Bitcoin Paper Wallet from www.bitaddress.org, which is one of the best Bitcoin Paper Wallet generators.
Steps To Create A Bitcoin Paper Wallet:
- First of all, launch the web browser on your PC and navigate to the website www.bitaddress.org
- Once the webpage loads up, click the right mouse button and from the options that appear, click on the “Save As” option.
- Name the webpage as “Bitcoin Paper Wallet” and save the webpage on your desktop and make sure to keep the format as “Webpage, Complete.”
- Disable the internet connection on your PC.
- Open the webpage that you saved in step 3.
- After the webpage loads, keep hovering your mouse on the web page to increase the randomness of the private key. The randomness level will increase until it reaches 100% so keep your mouse hovering until then.
- Once the randomness level reaches 100%, click on the “Paper Wallet” option.
- Now, the Paper Wallet will be generated.
- If more than one private Paper Wallet is being generated, change the value of the “Address to Generate” field to 1. The “Address to Generate” field can be found below the “Paper Wallet” option you clicked in step 7.
- Now, click on the “Generate” button.
- Once the paper wallet is generated, click on the “Ctrl” + “P” keys on your keyboard to print the paper wallet.
- After printing, cut out the main paper wallet leaving the empty paper portions.
That is it. You have successfully created your Bitcoin Paper Wallet. 🙂
How To Encrypt Bitcoin Paper Wallet?
In step 10, you might have seen an additional field titled “passphrase.” What the passphrase field does is that it adds a layer of protection over your private key.
To enable the passphrase field, check the “BIP38 Encrypt?” option and then you can enter any passphrase of your choice.
The private key will be again encrypted using the passphrase. This way, in case, if anyone else gets access to your Bitcoin Paper Wallet, they won’t be able to get your private key unless the passphrase is entered.
However, it is not mandatory to add a passphrase to generate the Bitcoin Paper Wallet.
We hope you enjoyed reading the tutorial and found it useful.
In case of any doubts on Bitcoin Paper Wallets, do leave a comment below and we will help you out.
Also, tell us what other paper wallet generators you use creating bitcoin paper wallet.