The minds of many amongst us get baffled up while thinking about the bitcoins paper wallets and their uses. This article will help to clear the concept of bitcoin paper wallet and its uses. So, basically a paper wallet works on offline mechanism. A bitcoin paper wallet, by no means, is similar to our conventional or regular wallets which are used by us to store our bills and cards. Instead, this paper wallet has no physical appearance to do daily transactions.
There are many other methods to store bitcoins other than a bitcoin paper wallet. A bitcoin paper wallet is a cold or offline storage of coins. it is important to know in depth about these paper wallets because this method of storing the coins may also involve a considerably huge risk and threat if not understood well. It may even result in the loss of your money.
Difference between Public and Private Keys
Bitcoin paper wallets were introduced in 2011. These wallets are different from the hot wallets as they work offline. In this method, crypto transaction is made by using the public and private keys which are produced by the key generator software. The difference between the public key and private key is important to understand. These keys provide us information that is stored in our bitcoin wallet. This information is printed out on a bitcoin paper wallet. The public key includes the wallet address so that people could transfer funds into the wallet, and the private key, as the name itself suggests is only to be kept private. It helps the owner of bitcoin paper wallet to spend his money safely. The private key is a secret number which was brought out by the ATM. Only the holder of a bitcoin paper wallet can use the private key to use his funds from his bitcoin paper wallet. These keys are printed on a piece of paper which includes two QR codes and two threads of characters. A bitcoin paper wallet as mentioned earlier is not connected to the internet so people have to control the keys manually. A bitcoin paper wallet is considered a reliable way to secure the bitcoins from being stolen by the cyber-attackers or malware etc. A bitcoin wallet maker must remember that bitcoin cannot be printed on a piece of paper like our regular currency. A bitcoin paper wallet prints out the information about the coins which is otherwise stored in some digital wallet also known as a bitcoin wallet.
In start, these paper wallets gained a lot of popularity as they could be removed from the internet but within couple of years the popularity graph rapidly came down because of the introduction of more reliable options I.e., hardware wallets.
The owners of bitcoin currency often go through the process to print the private key on a piece of paper to keep it with them. The method of using a bitcoin paper wallet is not less interesting. For this first of all a person must have a private key generator so that he could safely generate a private key. While using a key generator software one has to take some important steps in consideration for better safety of his coins. First of all, web-based key generators must be avoided as they are more vulnerable to the threats and your private key may also be leaked out. Therefore, ,while making your paper wallet key one must ensure that internet service is fully suspended during the process of key generation and once the desired work is done one must not forget to delete the browsing history to ensure a better security from the web-thieves. Experts even suggest to do this key generating work on a brand new computer which of course is not practically possible for everyone. But deleting your history and disconnecting your computers from internet are must to do things.
