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Paper Wallet

What Is A Paper Wallet?

What Is A Paper Wallet?

A paper wallet is a single private key and the corresponding bitcoin address written or printed on a piece of paper.

From 2011 to 2016, paper wallets were a popular method for storing bitcoin completely offline to protect it from being hacked or compromised. Paper wallets are almost obsolete as new methods of writing and storing private keys have become the standard.

Today, a seed phrase written down on paper is also often considered a paper wallet.

Why Use Paper Wallets?

Paper wallets are a unique type of bitcoin wallet because they are completely offline and are not able to connect to the internet whatsoever. They require the use of a mobile wallet, desktop wallet, hardware wallet, or web wallet to send bitcoin. This makes the one of the most secure methods to protect your bitcoin from online attacks and hackers.

Since paper itself is not very durable and is easily damaged or destroyed by tearing, fading ink, water, fire, impacts, corrosion, electrical shock, and even acid, it is best practice to stamp or etch your private keys/seed phrase into metal for long term storage.

The Best Paper Wallets

There’s a number of different types of paper wallets and they each have their own sets of pros and cons. Here are just a few of the best ways that you can use a paper wallet to write down your private keys or seed phrase.

A Piece Of Paper

Paper is the oldest mechanism for storing private keys and seed phrases. Although it is not nearly as durable as metal seed storage devices, it is often considered more secure than storing your private keys on a web wallet. If you are holding a serious amount of bitcoin, it’s best practice to use a more robust method to store your private keys or seed phrase such as stamped or etched into stainless steel.

Shieldfolio Stonebook

The Shieldfolio Stonebook (Affiliate) is a small book that is comprised of water and tear resistant pages for writing down your seed phrase, raw private keys, 2FA recovery codes, usernames, passwords, decryption keys, dice rolls, pin codes, notes, and more. Shieldfolio also offers a special pen that has ink that is only visible with a black light so you can hide information in plain sight and use a black light to reveal it. In the unfortunate event that your Stonebook were ever to become compromised, your private keys/seed phrase would not be immediately visible to the naked eye.