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Topic: Why would anyone want to use a paper wallet with raw private key? - page 2. (Read 356 times)

legendary
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I hadn't suggested anyone to use paper wallet ever especially those are newbie in bitcoin. They just simply heard from someone about paper wallet and trying to create it without proper knowledge. Even you can see a user had created brand new private key/address but when he checked on block explorer then it has been used. Means user even don't know which website is perfect to genarate private keys offline. There is lots of security concern regarding paper wallet. If anyone don't want to download whole blockchain then better to use full SPV wallet like electrum, it's open source and easily could write seeds and export private keys.

Most important concern is during first transaction if they move fund partially. Because they have only one address and there is no wallet & change address. So its huge risk of lost fund. Mostly people want to hold funds on paper wallet for long time. But on this case it's been suggested to buy a hardware wallet which is more secure from paper wallet. Otherwise better to use non-custodial open source wallet and write seed phrase on multiple paper which would save on multiple safe place.
legendary
Activity: 3038
Merit: 2162
I'm speaking strictly about the paper wallets that print out the raw private key, and not about wallets that ask users to backup their mnemonic seed.

This type of wallets has a lot of flaws:

You need to use printer to create it, which can be malicious. Especially f it's owned by a third party like a store.

They create just one address, which means you'll be tempted to reuse it to receive multiple transactions.

According to Bitcoin wiki, they have less error correction than seed phrases:

Quote
QR codes were not designed for secure storage of cryptographic material. QR codes have been damaged and made unscannable by water, crumpling and even folding the paper.

As seed phrases uses natural language words, they have far more error correction. Words written in bad handwriting can often still be read.

They are often generated by websites, which can easily be malicious. Example - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/vulnerability-discovered-on-bitcoinpaperwalletcom-do-not-use-it-5249129



A mnemonic seed wallet has many advantages - you only need pen and paper to make it, it creates a full wallet with as many addresses as you need, as well as change addresses, and you can even memorize the seed to additionally store it in your head.
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