With so many security concerns in regards to Bitcoins, more and more people are thinking about using paper wallets in order to contain their precious coins safely. These paper wallets are basically virtual currency wallets that are kept on paper, usually as a HD wallet seed. Since storing bitcoins offline is considered by many people as being the safest thing to do, the paper wallets are becoming more and more popular since they make it hard to access them if you’re not an authorized user.
In the case of a paper wallet, it’s important to know that that the private seed kept on them provide you with the complete authority in regards to spending your bitcoin funds. Because of that, this seed needs to be hidden since anyone accessing it will be able to spend your funds, which can lead to a lot of problems and inconveniences.
In order to prevent such a problem from appearing, you can try to encrypt the private key or, if that is not a solution, you can also split it into different parts and keep the secret, as well as the combination of numbers all to yourself.
With the help of such a public seed you can easily generate dozens or even more addresses when you need to generate bitcoins, and the best thing here is that unless the private seed is loaded, these addressed will be totally inaccessible, a great thing to say the least.
There are a few software solutions that already provide support for paper wallets, with Electrum as well as Armory being the best one. These tools make it easy for you to easily generate the necessary mnemonic codes that are needed for the wallets, and these can easily be printed or written down to your own paper wallet.
Creating a paper wallet isn’t that complicated, but in order to keep the whole process secure, you must make sure that you generate the wallet with the help of a live disk, as this ensures that the seed doesn’t have to deal with any malware. Once that is done, you have to perform a clean boot with the help of a bootable CD, and the computer that you use needs to avoid any internet connection. You will need the desired software, then print the wallet and then shut down your computer. When you use such a software, it’s imperative to make sure that there isn’t any internet connection, because any interference from the outside can bring immense security risks.
Once the process is completed, you need to do whatever it takes in order to make sure that the code is integral, as this way you can find out if any hacker has modified the contents of the paper wallet.
Lastly, use numerous anti-virus and anti-spyware protection tools, as these are essential when it comes to protecting your funds!
As you can see, using paper wallets is a very interesting and useful thing to do, however you do need to make sure that the paper wallets are created in a safe environment, because if anyone gets hold of your seed, you will have a great security risk. If you keep the seed safe, then you won’t have a problem!