Paper Wallets and New to Electrum/Bitcoins

[JohnDoeGotDough]

I am new to everything bitcoin pretty much. I have installed Electrum and thats about as far as I got. I am trying to make a transaction to an address I need to send bitcoins to. My question is, how do I put the BTC from my paper wallet into an electrum wallet and then send those BTC to the address I need to send it to. Anything will help, thanks for your time.

Regards, JD

[merelcoin]

I am new to everything bitcoin pretty much. I have installed Electrum and thats about as far as I got. I am trying to make a transaction to an address I need to send bitcoins to. My question is, how do I put the BTC from my paper wallet into an electrum wallet and then send those BTC to the address I need to send it to. Anything will help, thanks for your time.

Regards, JD

The paper wallet should contain a private key.
If the private key is bip38 encrypted, you might need to decrypt it by downloading the sourcecode from https://www.bitaddress.org and going to "wallet details"
Once you have an unencrypted private key, go to electrum, go to wallet => private keys => sweep, enter your private key, and sweep your paper wallet.

TBH: it's possible electrum can even decrypt the private key for you... you might want to try this first before using bitaddress.org, i just never tried, and i don't want to sweep my paper wallets just to try it out.

Once your private key is swept, it should be as easy as going to the send-tab in electrum and entering an ammount and an address.

[bitbaby]

The paper wallet should contain a private key.
If the private key is bip38 encrypted, you might need to decrypt it by downloading the sourcecode from https://www.bitaddress.org and going to "wallet details"
Once you have an unencrypted private key, go to electrum, go to wallet => private keys => sweep, enter your private key, and sweep your paper wallet.

It is actually much safer to decrypt the wallet offline, instead of doing it on a website, to do this OP, download this file from here: GitHub Repository (zip), verify the download authenticity and then continue with the steps mentioned above to decrypt the key and sweep it into Electrum.

TBH: it's possible electrum can even decrypt the private key for you... you might want to try this first before using bitaddress.org, i just never tried, and i don't want to sweep my paper wallets just to try it out.

Nope, Electrum won't decrypt the private key, one has to decrypt it first before sweeping it into Electrum.

[merelcoin]

The paper wallet should contain a private key.
If the private key is bip38 encrypted, you might need to decrypt it by downloading the sourcecode from https://www.bitaddress.org and going to "wallet details"
Once you have an unencrypted private key, go to electrum, go to wallet => private keys => sweep, enter your private key, and sweep your paper wallet.

It is actually much safer to decrypt the wallet offline, instead of doing it on a website, to do this OP, download this file from here: GitHub Repository (zip), verify the download authenticity and then continue with the steps mentioned above to decrypt the key and sweep it into Electrum.

TBH: it's possible electrum can even decrypt the private key for you... you might want to try this first before using bitaddress.org, i just never tried, and i don't want to sweep my paper wallets just to try it out.

Nope, Electrum won't decrypt the private key, one has to decrypt it first before sweeping it into Electrum.

Had a party last night, had a bit much to drink when i made this post... Can't believe i skipped the "best to run the code from an offline pc"-part 
Thanks for adding this

Btw: a little addendum, you could use unetbootin (just google this) to create a live linux usb to boot from (for safety). Also, once you've swept your paper wallet, consider it compromised and never use it again to store funds on