Term
Paper wallet
A paper wallet is a physical printout of a cryptocurrency private key or seed phrase — an offline storage method that was popular before hardware wallets became affordable, still occasionally used as a low-tech cold storage backup.
A paper wallet is a piece of paper with a private key or seed phrase printed on it. In the early crypto era, this was a common way to hold long-term Bitcoin savings — generate the key offline, print it, put the paper in a safe. Modern usage is mostly as a backup layer alongside a hardware wallet.
The risks are physical rather than cryptographic. Paper degrades: it can burn, get water-damaged, fade, be misplaced, be found by a family member cleaning out a drawer years later. It also cannot survive a house fire without additional protection. For any meaningful holding, metal backups (stainless-steel or titanium plates engraved with the seed) are the modern equivalent.
Generating a paper wallet safely means doing it on an air-gapped machine and never re-entering the key into any networked device except during recovery. Never generate a paper wallet on a random website — the site can capture the key and drain the funds at any time in the future.
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