Restoring paper wallets

[bitcoin_banana]

I've been reading about paper wallets but have some questions about restoring your coins from your paper wallet.

- Where can I restore a paper wallet generated from bitaddress.org? I thought bitaddress.org itself would have some sort of import feature, but it looks like I have to go to another site or wallet to import the private key?

- Are paper wallets standardized enough that if I were to generate a paper wallet from one client, I have a pretty good chance of restoring my coins in some other client?

- Are there other paper wallet generators that generate generic paper wallets I can import on multiple clients? I'm just confused whether Armory would require me to use Armory in the future to import their paper wallet. Same goes for Electrum. It seems they have their own brand of paper wallets that are only compatible with their clients?

So at the core of all this, I'm just really worried about creating a paper wallet, send all my coins there, wait ten years or whatever, bring out the slip of paper and find out that I have no way of importing my private key.

Thanks for any clarification you can give me.

[BurtW]

Almost any wallet will import a private key.

The formats are standard.

Just try it with a small amount first:

Print paper wallet
Send small amount to the public address
Check the transfer on the blockchain
Wait a day or two for the heck of it
Import the private key into your favorite wallet

If your favorite wallet cannot import a private key, get a new favorite.

[bstone108]

some types of encryption of your private key's may not be portable.  but the key itself is portable to any client that supports importing.  you can even import your key into the official bitcoin-qt client using the console.  instructions are out there somewhere [forgot where I saw them] to do so.  All clients use keys the same way to my knowledge.

As for what clients can import,  many.  I'm not sure if multibit can, but I know armory can,  bitcoin-qt can from console,  and there's a couple on android that can.  mycelium is one. [might be spelled wrong]

just be sure to test with a small transaction so you don't loose a lot of coin.