Bitcoin Forum

Hi,

I am looking for advice on how I can give some of my friends paper wallets loaded with BTC for Christmas. I came across bitaddress.org and theirs look nice. How do you fund them and where are the bitcoins actually stored? Is bitaddress.org trusted?

I figure if I buy all of my friends enough paper wallets, we can just buy a private island when bitcoin reaches critical mass  ;)

No but seriously any advice is much appreciated.

All bitaddress does is create a keypair for you, print it out and send bitcoins to the public key. When you want to redeem it import the private key to mtgox or blockchain.info or use pywallet.  ;)

The words the paper wallets use are "Load & Verify" for the (public) Bitcoin address and "Redeem" for the private key.

So yes, you simply send funds to the Bitcoin address from the paper wallet where it shows "Load & Verify".

Now, if these are gifts, what you can do is print out another copy and store it and then next year if the funds haven't been spent, you can offer to redeem (or reprint with the 2013 version, which will have something really cool I'm sure.)

As with all bitcoins, the bitcoins are stored in the publicly shared blockchain once the transaction receives a confirmation. Until then the bitcoins are stored in the memory pool of all the bitcoin clients and miners.  The wallet only stores the "password" (private keys) that allow you to add new transactions to he bitcoin network that make use of those coins.  This is why a "paper wallet" is simply a written/printed private key that is associated with a bitcoin address.

Awesome. Thanks for all the help guys. I'm going to try to do this today. I'll be sure to post the outcome.

True. I wasn't commenting on its security or trustworthiness. I was just answering the question of "where the bitcoins are stored", and explaining what the paper wallet provides you with for attempting to accessing those "stored" bitcoins in the future.

If you choose to use a website to generate those addresses, then you are choosing to take on certain risks including but not limited to the fact that they could provide you with an unreviewed version of the site that generates private keys that they have access to.