Bitcoin as a gift for a baby?

[K~Ehleyr]

Serious question.  My baby niece will be 1 year old in a few weeks and she's going to get lots of lovely and expensive presents from all the family, but I'm her geeky aunt and I want to encourage her geeky side.  I'm considering making her a vanity address , printing it on a paper wallet and funding it with some bitcoin, in the hope that by the time she's old enough to appreciate it, the value might have appreciated also.  But I have some concerns...

Is a vanity address sufficiently secure if I generate it and the paper wallet offline and assume my computer has no malware?  (I have enough antivirus/anti-malware software in action and really, if I do have that level of malware, I'm screwed anyway)

And the impossible question... is bitcoin a reasonable risk for such a long term investment?  If she's 1 now, it could be 15 years before she accesses the funds in that wallet.  I won't be able to sell out if I see a crash coming like I can with my own.  I know nobody can really judge what Bitcoin is going to do over that period and I don't want this to turn into yet another one of those speculation threads where people post crap.  So I guess my real question here is has anybody else done this or put bitcoin in cold storage for a similarly long period?

And are there any other considerations I haven't thought of?

[1715457464]

1715457464

[n691309]

I haven't done it in the past neither I plan to do it in the near future, but is a good idea though. To generate a brand new vanity address or use the free/cheap services here or generate yourself from a clean pc. If you give them an address with the private key you can always hold the private key and sell if price crashes but anyway this is a present. I would give as present a physical bitcoin and the vanity address.

[K~Ehleyr]

Thank you

[calkob]

What vanity gen are you using? and yes i have done it for my kids tho i didnt bother with a vanity address i just got an address off of bitaddress.

[bestluck]

In the coming age when she will be in the position when she will have good knowledge about bitcoin and will know that how to use bitcoin, she will be much more happy that you gifted her some bitcoins, and that will be her luck that the price will be much higher at her adulthood age when she will be able to use them.

[n691309]

What vanity gen are you using? and yes i have done it for my kids tho i didnt bother with a vanity address i just got an address off of bitaddress.

As far as I know there is only one vanitygenerator and you should have a good cpu/gpu to get faster the vanityaddress (with 4-5 characters as prefix mostly) but also people are offering a part private key for your vanity address which sometimes can be free sometimes cost a little bit.

Thank you

My pleasure.

[YIz]

Sounds like a really good idea for a gift. I would have appreciated if my aunt bought me some precious virual gem that could rise in price when I was one year old. it might actually catch a lot of value in 15 years and might even buy her a nice car or something if it goes well with bitcoin in the future.

Make sure to safely generate the private key in an offline computer, I'd recommend bitaddress.org, you can also download the source from Github and run it offline. By the way, why not give her out a USB drive? it's a good idea as well and you can also buy two 4GB cheap drives and back it up on the two of them, give her one and keep one as backup.

[K~Ehleyr]

Ooh, a USB copy - I hadn't thought of that!  I guess USB drives can deteriorate over time though, and who knows how storage tech will progress.  Everything I considered important in my youth is trapped on floppy disks that I'll never access again    It's worth considering though.

As far as I know there is only one vanitygenerator and you should have a good cpu/gpu to get faster the vanityaddress (with 4-5 characters as prefix mostly) but also people are offering a part private key for your vanity address which sometimes can be free sometimes cost a little bit.

I've used Vanitygen a couple of times now and my CPU can generate an address from a 4-digit prefix in a few seconds, still well under a minute for 5-digits.  I've also practised generating a paper wallet offline.

Obviously I'd love it to be worth a lot more by the time she opens it, but my main concern is that I don't want it to turn out to be a worthless piece of paper   Ideally it will be a nice little egg for her and spark an interest in cryptography at the same time.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

It's definitely a creative and thoughtful idea.  I haven't heard much on this forum about paper wallets being a security risk.  To the contrary, I think they're the hardest ones to steal--but they can get lost, damaged, burned up in a fire, etc. 

Anyhow it's a great gift idea, so hopefully it goes over well. 

[BitLinkInvestments]

Honestly this is so unique.  I love the idea and think it would work out perfectly.   It's basically the same thing as setting her up a saving account with the bank, instead you are doing it with Bitcoin. 

[skylighters]

i doubt it is a good idea to be honest, i think such small kids should just receive children toys and stuff like that though thats just my ideas

[rio3233]

Well, i think it's unnecessary for the baby. Because the baby don't know about bitcoin and the parents can use that bitcoin. But it's really unique gift for a baby and extraordinary.

[Mumbeeptind1963]

Bitcoin as a gift for baby is nice gift because while they growing your gift price will rise too, so it is nice to gift bitcoin for baby, Hehe nice idea i have niece too, and i want to gift her some bitcoin but not 1 bitcoin is so large money, i cant afford that bitcoin i think .1 only.

[madwica]

Baby can not appreciate that at the moment i think it is good to give a milk or diaper because that is very useful for the baby while bitcoin that was good to gift for the teenager and up they can use it anywhere they want.

[mk4]

Give her a bitcoin piggybank!

Take a look at this post on imgur. Saw it somewhere a few months ago. 

http://imgur.com/gallery/hbB1w

[shinratensei_]

Serious question.  My baby niece will be 1 year old in a few weeks and she's going to get lots of lovely and expensive presents from all the family, but I'm her geeky aunt and I want to encourage her geeky side.  I'm considering making her a vanity address , printing it on a paper wallet and funding it with some bitcoin, in the hope that by the time she's old enough to appreciate it, the value might have appreciated also.  But I have some concerns...

Is a vanity address sufficiently secure if I generate it and the paper wallet offline and assume my computer has no malware?  (I have enough antivirus/anti-malware software in action and really, if I do have that level of malware, I'm screwed anyway)

And the impossible question... is bitcoin a reasonable risk for such a long term investment?  If she's 1 now, it could be 15 years before she accesses the funds in that wallet.  I won't be able to sell out if I see a crash coming like I can with my own.  I know nobody can really judge what Bitcoin is going to do over that period and I don't want this to turn into yet another one of those speculation threads where people post crap.  So I guess my real question here is has anybody else done this or put bitcoin in cold storage for a similarly long period?

And are there any other considerations I haven't thought of?

About long-term is too bad, because you don't need what happened in the future, it's not a predicted or speculating but better for giving him goods it's useful for him like a doll and another thing is can be useful for him because he are a baby and it's too fast for think about long term.

[GregH37]

Every thing is fine. the problem is just with bitcoin price and rate which is completely unknown and unpredictable.
you can save a bitcoin for as long as you want no matter if it is 1 year or 15 years. but we don't know what will be the bitcoin price after 15 years..

Well, i think it's unnecessary for the baby. Because the baby don't know about bitcoin and the parents can use that bitcoin. But it's really unique gift for a baby and extraordinary.

this is just a gift not for his present but for his future.

[drwtsn32]

As a baby, she will not appreciate that as a gift. But she will when she reaches the right age.
How lucky for a woman, she grows up with tons of money.  

[carlfebz2]

As a baby, she will not appreciate that as a gift. But she will when she reaches the right age.
How lucky for a woman, she grows up with tons of money.  

True, she would not appreciate the  gift since she was only a baby and dont know everything  but possible she would amused or appreciate that gift when  she reaches the right age and able to know what bitcoin is and its value and also its uses. Maybe if  he found out that she has a bitcoin maybe the price is already high which means an easy money. haha

[DannyHamilton]

Is a vanity address sufficiently secure if I generate it and the paper wallet offline and assume my computer has no malware?

If it is properly generated?  Yes.

And the impossible question... is bitcoin a reasonable risk for such a long term investment?

It's much better than a lottery ticket.  If bitcoin reaches mainstream use in her lifetime, she'll be absolutely amazed at your foresight and extremely thankful for your generosity.  If bitcoin fails and disappears into a footnote in financial textbooks, then she'll be mildly entertained at your naivete and gullibility.  Either way its a fun gift that will come up in conversations years later.

So I guess my real question here is has anybody else done this or put bitcoin in cold storage for a similarly long period?

I've helped both my sister and my father put some bitcoins into cold storage back in 2013.  Both of them plan to just ignore the daily fluctuations.  If there is suddenly enough value to retire early, they'll cash out (or simply start spending bitcoin if it has REALLY gone mainstream.  If it never reaches that value (or collapses completely), the money is already out of mind and considered "spent", so nobody will be devastated at the loss.

And are there any other considerations I haven't thought of?

Your biggest concern will probably be that the piece of paper could either get lost, damaged, or the ink could fade and become unusable.
The next concern would be someone getting a hold of the paper wallet that decides to take the bitcoins without permission (family member, future boyfriend, etc).

Assuming that the paper wallet is created in a secure manner, and that it lasts 15+ years, and that the bitcoins haven't been stolen before your niece can access them...

You might want to think about whether you (or anyone else in the family) will want to contribute additional bitcoins in the future.  My suggestion would be to generate new paper wallets for each gift in the future and not to re-use the existing address.  That will make it easier to cash in just some of the gifts without risking the others, and if any of the paper wallets are ever created on a compromised computer, it will only effect that one gift and not all the others.

One other thing to keep aware of is how technology advances over the next decade or two.  Occasionally technology can make sudden leaps and if a mathematical weakness is discovered in ECDSA or any of the hashing algorithms that bitcoin uses, then bitcoin could transition to a new address format.  If that happens, old addresses would almost certainly still be valid, but they might not be as secure.  You'd want to generate a new address using the new address system and send the bitcoins from the paper wallets to the new address system to keep them safe.