Hi spruce, I see you've met one of our resident trolls. Don't sweat it, their bark is much worse than their 'bite'.
You could do as you suggest and have a wallet under your control which you can 'offline' for a while by having the information printed in whatever media you prefer. You'd just have to reintegrate the wallet to a current client and download the blockchain to update things before sending your gift.
You could do as you suggest and have a wallet under your control which you can 'offline' for a while by having the information printed in whatever media you prefer. You'd just have to reintegrate the wallet to a current client and download the blockchain to update things before sending your gift.
Thanks for the warning.
If it were me, I wouldn't need to have an online wallet at all. For example, I could get some bitcoins at an exchange like Mt Gox, withdraw them directly to a paper address generated offline by someone I trust, then just hand over the private key when I was ready to transfer the coins. I wouldn't have to import the key into my wallet at all. I wouldn't even need to keep a wallet if I didn't want to, although I would probably still retain some small anount of spending money in one. If the recipient wished to spend the money he would have to import the key somewhere, but that would be up to him once he had the private key.
