Ok...I tried Electrum...it works fine if you use the 51 character base58 private key....but it does not recognize the PRIVATE KEY BIP38 FORMAT...i need to try that to see if password decrypts it and then show private and public key correctly
Thanks
I can't find any 100% trustable well known wallets that can both decrypt bip38 keys and display the decrypted results. However if you search github for bip38 plenty of results come up. Don't blame me if any of them are malicious and steal your Bitcoins. If you try any of them only do it in a secure isolated offline environment like in a virtual machine.
You are wise to be cautious. There was a bug in bitcoinpaperwallet and bitaddress that made wallets created in Safari 6.05 undecryptable in any other browser. This is the bitcoinpaperwallet dev's announcement of it.
Hi, bitcoinpaperwallet.com author here.Over on GitHub, artiomchi and I have been working on adding BIP38 support. As some of you know, I've been extremely cautious/slow/dragging my heels with BIP38 implementation since it's relatively new and not especially well supported by wallet software and services.
During testing, we uncovered an issue with Safari version 6.05 in which BIP38 encrypted wallets end up with a different (essentially
wrong and invalid) "6P..." private key. The only way to decode one of these wallets is to use Safari 6.05 for decryption as well. If you upgrade your browser after printing a BIP38 wallet using Safari 6.05, you won't be able to decrypt it unless you find some way to downgrade back to 6.05.
This is a problem endemic to most (all?) services implementing BIP38 via Javascript -- bitaddress.org, etc. It doesn't impact
https://bitcoinpaperwallet.com because we haven't deployed BIP38 (yet).
As a preliminary step until a fix is in place, I recommend:1. Do not use Safari version 6 to make any new BIP38 wallets
2. If you already used Safari version 6 to make BIP38 wallets, decrypt those paper wallets right now (using Safari 6, nothing else will work) and keep an unencrypted paper backup somewhere safe. Consider making new BIP38 wallets using Chrome or Firefox, and use them to receive funds from your Safari 6-encrypted wallets. Once you're sure your safari-6 BIP38 encrypted wallets are empty, discard.
Here are the relevant threads if you want to dig into the nitty gritty, or contribute your own tests/validation:
https://github.com/cantonbecker/bitcoinpaperwallet/pull/6https://github.com/pointbiz/bitaddress.org/issues/56https://github.com/mannkind/bit2factor.org/issues/2Huge thanks to /u/artiomchi for his excellent work bringing BIP38 to bitcoinpaperwallet.com and for helping to narrow down this possibly alarming issue.
Bitcoinpaperwallet acknowledges that few wallets can import BIP38 keys and can only recommend using its own paper wallet page for decryption.
https://bitcoinpaperwallet.com/wallet-tutorial-add-withdraw-funds/Important note for BIP38-encrypted paper wallets
Not many bitcoin wallet applications or web services are able to directly import BIP38 password-protected private keys. In this case, you will have to use the "Validate" feature on the generator to extract the unencrypted Wallet Import Format (WIF) key as an intermediate step before sweeping the balance.
