Question about paper with address (my first post)

[SquirrelJulietGarden]

In 2020 I gave a paper wallet to a friend.

It was the seed of a wallet containing $20 in BTC. He was a computer scientist and i know he could recover it after a google search. No big deal and it was a nice gift and way to introduce a friend to bitcoin,.

It can be considered as your Bitcoin "giftcard" to your friend and people with Internet can search and learn about Bitcoin very easily. How to spend coins from a wallet or how to import a private key for accessing the coin and spend it.

Especially now with AI, asking such questions will result in very quick but helpful answers and guides from AI. Reminder for everyone is never share private key with anyone, with any tool, as it's your key, and you must be the only one have it for actually owning your coin.

Like this answer with searching on Google.

Spending Bitcoin directly with a private key means you are sweeping the funds from a legacy "paper" wallet or a standalone address into a modern, active wallet. To do this securely, you must import the private key into a trusted software wallet, then send the Bitcoin to a new, secure address.

It's a good answer to begin with and learn more after that.
[overview] Recover Bitcoin from any old storage format.

[Z-tight]

Why is it risky? It is so easy to recover. A paper wallet can be just a back up of a seed, or even a public/private key pair which you can open in electrum or any other wallet.

If you are not gifting 10,000 or more, it should be fine.

I wouldn't gift a complete novice anything more than a few hundred $ in BTC through a paper wallet. Good thing op's brother kept it well below that, at $50, as confirmed by the op.

A paper wallet is risky for newbies and BTC novices for obvious reasons. I.e. They could easily lose the paper and hence the money. A novice may also fail to import their private key in a safe environment and as a result could lose the coins.

I would also not expect a complete novice to understand the difference between importing and sweeping a private key. So if they choose to import their private key into a software wallet and only spend a part of the funds, they may have to back up their change address before deleting the software wallet. Failure to do so, and they'd lose their funds, and a novice would most likely fail to do so.