Hi there,
First up, please excuse me if my question has been answered elsewhere; I couldn't find an easy answer by searching.
I've followed the directions to securely generate, print and store a paper wallet, but there are some things I haven't quite been able to wrap my head around yet.
I have an online wallet with blockchain.info, and I have discovered I can manually input a wallet address and private key. I have also discovered that I could delete a wallet with bitcoins in it (0.005 to be exact), and as long as I still had the address and private key stored elsewhere I could re-input them and the bitcoins would still be there. I wanted to test if I could do this so I could protect myself against someone hacking into my blockchain account and stealing my bitcoins; in other words just use blockchain like a gateway, instead of leaving my populated information on their system.
My question is, if I want to receive payment from someone, can I give them one of the wallet addresses from my piece of paper which I have never used or entered into blockchain? If they send a payment, will I be able to input the wallet/key details at some point in the future and the bitcoins will be identified and show up?
From what I understand I believe this to be correct, but please help me out with some piece of mind
![Smiley](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
Also, how on earth does the website search through what must be millions of bitcoins so quickly to identify which ones belong to your wallet?
Thanks for your advice.