There are dozens of virtual wallets available over the internet that let you store your bitcoins. All the virtual Wallet service providers claim to offer you the highest level of safety which they actually do. But being a digital asset, you can’t just deny the possibility of hacking no matter how trivial that is. Alas, there have been several malicious activities and hacking attempts over the past few years, that it raised some serious security concerns regarding the storage of bitcoins.
Since the digital storage is prone to hacking and malware attacks, it might be risky to store your bitcoins in a digital wallet. So, there has to be some other alternative which doesn’t involve digital media.
What Is A Paper Wallet?
Paper Wallet. You might have come across this term several times but you don’t know exactly what that is. Well, don’t worry. This blog post might help you out with this.
In simple terms, a paper wallet is just a physical and offline means of storing bitcoins. By making a paper wallet, you’re just printing your private keys and bitcoin addresses on a paper. Seeing it this way, a paper wallet is a document containing copies of your public and private keys, thereby making up a physical wallet. These paper wallets also have QR codes so that you can scan the QR code to feed the keys into a virtual wallet to make transactions on the go.
Why Use Paper Wallets?
Whenever you store your bitcoins in a wallet, you gain access to a public key and a private key. The public key as its name suggests is visible to everyone through a publicly accessible directory. But your private key must be kept confidential. This is because your public key is always in an encrypted format. It’s more likely to be a code and it can be decrypted only through its corresponding private key.
For instance, Suppose you want to send some sensitive data to your friend, Maria. In that case, your top notch priority is that it should be received by Maria only and nobody else. To ensure that, you encrypt the data with Maria’s public key so that only Maria can access the data through her private key. So in this way, even if a third party gains access to the data, he or she can’t decrypt it without Maria’s private key. But what if the private key of Maria gets stolen? Then I guess, it’s all gone.
So, it was just to tell you that the top priority for anyone should be to keep the private key safe. And this what paper wallets do. They help you keep a copy of all your public and private keys in a physical form.
The greatest benefit of using paper wallets for cold storage is that you don’t need to store your keys in digital format. So there are no potential threats such as hacking or malware attacks.
How To Claim Your Paper Wallet?
The process of generating a paper wallet might sound a bit glitchy but it’s actually very simple. A number of websites over the internet allow you to make your own paper wallet just by following some simple steps. One such website is bitcoinpaperwallet.com which lets you make a double sided, tri-fold and temper-proof paper wallet. You just need to follow some instructions and enter the details of your virtual wallet. By doing this, a soft copy of your paper wallet will be generated. Once you’re done with that, there’s just one more thing to do. Take a print out of the generated paper wallet onto a paper and cut it carefully from the edges. That’s it! Your paper wallet is ready.
So, you see how easy it is to take a paper wallet. And it is possibly the safest way to store your bitcoin address as of now. But who knows? As the time goes by, the bitcoin enthusiasts might come up with even better ideas. We just hope to see that soon.
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