Bitcoin Forum

I just a saw a tweet from an Indian journalist where he had created a paper wallet on an online website, and when he checked recently his funds were wiped out.

You can check the thread here: https://mobile.twitter.com/ThatNaimish/status/1228738864442830849

Having 'padlock' icon on website doesn't mean it's not scam.

Learn from mistakes of others, stay safe!

I remember using this service a few years back and I never had a problem with it. It appears that a lot of scam accusations started to show[1][2][3] after the original owner sold the site[4].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/cyd6uj/bitcoinpaperwalletcom_scam_or_not_4_btc_stolen/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/cs68ri/my_paper_wallet_generated_on/
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/ea6bxg/warning_bitcoinpaperwalletcom_is_compromised/
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/942435/bitcoinpaperwalletcom_is_under_new_ownership/

I wanted to create some paper wallets just a few days ago too, and I didn't specifically because I'm afraid the websites I've used years ago are now compromised.

I'd rather create a core wallet and place myself the addresses and private keys on a text file & just print it.

Is there any offline website that offers just the paper wallet design and two text fields to manually input your private & public keys? I'm kinda afraid those offline auto-generating paper wallets are not really generating random keys and they're already known to the owner, if it makes sense.

You mean there will be box to write the key? Isn't it still same? Or you are looking for printing a blank where you will manually write down the key? That makes no sense.
If anyone is interested to learn how best you can generate paper wallet, you can catch up everything here- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5198310.0

You can just make a design on your own then. I believe there's no website that serves such purpose.

If you're afraid about the randomness, use an open-source 'website' where you can use it offline. Such as https://github.com/pointbiz/bitaddress.org or https://github.com/iancoleman/bip39.

I meant a website that generates just the design and lets you copy-paste in a text field the private and public keys, automatically generating QR codes for them. All offline.

To me it makes sense, as this could then be used for basically any cryptocurrency in an offline mode. If you need a paper wallet for some unknown coin, you'd just open up that offline page and create it by yourself using the QT wallet of it.

I see. I know both of them but not knowing like anything about coding still puts me in doubt.

bitaddress.org will let you do this. Just click on the "Wallet Details" tab and paste your private key in. It will generate all associated WIF keys, public addresses, and QR codes.

Don't rely on their random number generator then, and create your own entropy manually.

You could use the Ian Coleman site at https://iancoleman.io/bip39/ (downloaded and ran offline on a live OS on an airgapped computer), and check the box "Show entropy details". You can then flip a coin 256 times and enter 0 for heads and 1 for tails, or roll a 6 sided die 100 times and enter the sequence of numbers, or even draw 54 cards from a deck of cards. Plug that in and it will use your entropy to generate a seed phrase, private keys, public keys, and addresses.

If you want to rely on websites even less, then you could flip a coin 256 times, arrange your results in groups of 4 (so 64 groups of 4), use a handy table like this one (https://i.imgur.com/Qmhe8Xo.png) to convert from binary to hex, and then use your resulting number in hex as your private key in bitaddress as above to generate your QR codes.

There was something telling me that I have seen this website before but I realized that this was posted in the forum several times in the past years but I have never seen posts about it being a scam. They even have a ANN thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=169836.0) for their website here in the forum so it was really a surprise to me to see them scamming people right now. OmegaStarScream might be right the the site ownership changing of hands is the reason why there are now scams happening from that site.

Awesome. Thank you, that's all I needed. Will use bitaddress with the Wallet Details function on an airgapped PC. :)