How Bitcoin Paper Wallets Provide Protection Against Cyber Attacks

There are dozens of decentralized wallet apps available over the internet that let you store Bitcoins. All these digital wallets claim to provide top-notch security to Bitcoin transactions and the stored BTC amount which they actually do. But being a digital entity, you just can’t deny the possibility of a cyber attack no matter how trivial it is. Alas, there have been plenty of malicious activities and hacking attempts in the past that it raised some serious security concern regarding the storage of BTC.

There’s no denying that the digital entities are more prone to cyber attacks. So there’s always some risk involved when it comes to storing your valuable assets in a digital entity. But there has to be another way to store your Bitcoins safely instead of storing these on Bitcoin wallets. Actually, there is!

Also read How To Protect Your Bitcoin Wallet.

Introducing Paper Wallet

Paper Wallet. You might have come across this term several times but you don’t exactly know what that is. Perhaps, this blog might help you with that.

In a nutshell, a paper wallet is physical and offline way of storing Bitcoins. By creating a paper wallet, what you’re doing is, “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 which makes up your physical wallet called paper wallet. All these paper wallets also contain printed QR codes. You can scan this QR code to feed the keys into a virtual wallet to make transactions on the go.

How To Use A Paper Wallet?

Whenever you set and store your funds in a BTC wallet, you get access to a public key and a private key. The public key, as the name suggests is visible to everyone through a publically accessible directory. On contrary to this, your private key must be kept confidential. This is because your public is always encrypted. It’s an alphanumeric code that makes up your Bitcoin wallet address. It is primarily a code which is 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.

It was just so you know that the first priority for anyone should be keep the private key well under protection. This is what paper wallets do! They help you keep a copy of all your public and private keys in physical form.

Perhaps, the biggest benefit of using a paper wallet for cold storage is that you don’t need to store your keys in digital format.

How To Create A Paper Wallet?

The process of generating a paper wallet is very simple. There are numerous websites over the internet that allow you to create a paper wallet to store your precious keys. One such website is Bitcoinpaperwallet.com. By accessing this website, anyone can create a Bitcoin wallet in few simple steps. It lets you make a double sided, tri-fold paper wallet. Just follow the on-screen instructions and enter the details of your existing Bitcoin wallet. When you do that, a soft copy of your requested paper wallet is generated. After that, there’s just one more thing left to do. Take a print out of the generated paper wallet on to a paper and cut it carefully from the edges. That’s it! Your paper wallet is ready.

In the same way, you can also create paper wallets for other popular cryptocurrencies. There’s a similar website called LiteAddress.org that lets you generate paper wallets for Litecoin in the exact same way. Seeing all the options that we have today, paper wallet seems like the safest way to store your valuable cryptocurrency assets. But who knows, the Bitcoin enthusiasts may come up with even better ideas in future. We just hope that happens soon enough.