How to withdraw Bitcoin from paper wallet? As the name suggests, a paper wallet is, simply, a wallet on a piece of paper. This special paper contains the public and private keys of a cryptocurrency address. These keys are often displayed as QR codes or alphanumeric strings. Owners of paper wallets can subsequently receive cryptocurrency transactions by sharing their address with others.
Some paper wallet providers give users the option to generate new addresses and keys while being offline. To do so, users are required to download the wallet generator as an HTML file and execute it while being disconnected from the Internet.
As such, paper wallets are often considered as an alternative for cold storage. Their security is also related to the fact that they present a completely analog format, meaning they are relatively safe from hacker invasion or other attacks that can only be performed in the digital environment.
Paper Wallet risks
Besides the risk of loss, theft, fire, and water damage, there are other reasons paper wallets have gone out of style. You must use a trusted wallet generator, but because many are open-source software, malicious hackers have created modified versions available online that can steal your keys.
To be safe, you should save the wallet generators as a web archive, then go offline and click on the web archive file to generate the key offline. Following which, use a printer that is not on a public network and print the key.
How to withdraw Bitcoin from paper wallet?
If users want to transfer Bitcoins to a paper wallet, they have to open their live wallet software (e.g. Mycelium, Bread, Trezor) or web-based wallet (e.g. blockchain.info, coinbase.com) and send funds from your live wallet to the public address shown on the paper wallet.
To do the opposite, you can go to virtually any wallet software of Bitcoin service that includes a “import private key” or “spend from cold storage” function that will accept the private key of the paper wallet. However, some wallets like Coinbase.com cannot directly sweep the paper wallet. It is encouraged to use software such as Mycelium (Android) or Bread (IOS) to import funds from paper wallets.
For paper wallets that are BIP-38 encrypted, users would have to use the “Validate” function on the generator to extract the encrypted Wallet Import Format (WIF) key before sweeping the balance.
In Conclusion
How to withdraw Bitcoin from paper wallet? It is recommended that paper wallets are treated like a piggy bank, where you can put in as much money as you want, but extract everything out only once. Make sure that you withdraw your assets from reliable wallet softwares.
