So you've been storing crypto securely on a paper wall of the years and you've
decided it's time to spend it or maybe to move that to a hardware wallet and
you want to know how to do that securely. I've had a look on YouTube when I look
for how to sweep paper wallets or how to spend from a paper wallet all of the
guides I see basically just direct you to use a software wallet and to sweep it
that way, whether it's using something like the blockchain.com wallet or just
Electrum or Bitcoin core or even the video that I did that looks at using
Coinomi and while these methods might be okay for smaller amounts of crypto
you have a paper wallet that's storing a significant amount of value are simply
using a software and trusting that the device, the software and all of
these things can be trusted to do the right thing might, not be secure enough
for you. So what I'm gonna run through in this video is how to use your smartphone
and your PC to securely sweep a paper wallet most importantly of all your
private key will actually stay fully offline until the funds have been swept.
Even for those who don't have a paper wallet, this process can be really useful
just even to understand something of what goes on inside your hardware wallet
because as you'll see the process for sending transactions backwards and
forwards and verifying them, is very very similar to what goes on when you're
using a hardware wallet and if you have already done so hit subscribe and that
way can stay and in the loop for content I make to help you find your way in a crazy
and often hostile environment that is cryptocurrency. So for this video what
you're gonna need is an Android smartphone and a PC, preferably one with
a webcam. If you don't have access to an Android smartphone you can just use a
second computer anything that runs Electrum will be fine, and you can either
fumble around trying to align screens with webcams on computers or you can use
USB to move stuff around every time you see me talk about a step that involves
scanning QR code. So the first thing you're going to have to do is install
Electrum on your PC and on your mobile phone. So we're going to go to electrum.org
don't just google electrum and go to the first thing that comes up, and then
we're going to go to download, and we're just going to download the latest
version of electrum for our environment. So i'm gonna download the Windows
installer and I'm also going to download the APK file as well as the signatures
for each of the files because one of the things with software wallets like
Electrum is it isn't enough just to download it from electrum.org
and I've talked about why this is in a video on network attacks, but basically what you
want to do is verify the GPG signature for Electrum. It will take you a few
minutes and I've done a video that walks through how to do that. We've download
the Installer for Windows have download the APK for Android and so we can verify
they are exactly what they should be. If that's just way over your head the next
best thing can be to get your phone to disconnect from your Wi-Fi just so using
your mobile carrier's Internet and so to install Electrum off the app store and a
good way to verify that you've got the right one and not so fake is to go to
electrum.org , to go to the download page and then to click on the Google Play
link. The key reason why this is secure is
because what we're gonna do in this process is download software from
multiple different sources using multiple different internet connections
and multiple different devices and what that means is that an attacker wanted to
do something that would cause you to send the funds somewhere else, to them,
that they'll have to compromise not just one device, but two completely different
devices, independent devices at the same time. It's not enough for them simply to
compromise the network you're using your PC or the wallet software that happens
to be installed on your PC already. The other really useful thing is that this
is Electrum is open source and it runs on Python so you can actually just
download the source and run directly from source yourself on your PC and if
you're really paranoid you can even build your own APK for the mobile phone
all right so we've got electrum installed on our phone and on our pc and
out comes the most important step... Do not skip this step... You need to put your
phone into flight mode, so we want to be making sure the Wi-Fi is disabled, we
want to be making sure bluetooth is disabled and if you're really wanting to
be extra sure that things are all above board this is where you could take
out the SIM card in your phone. So this device is now fully offline and air-gapped
and we are not going to turn any of the networking features of this back on
until we are finished. The reason being that even if there is something
malicious on here that's going to leak our private keys, it's not going to be
able to do so until after we have swept our funds securely. So our phone is now
our air-gapped device and it will be running fully offline. We have our paper
wallet just here which is an old sort of bitaddress.org style paper wallet you know
there's two QR codes on there one for deposit one for spend. As much as
these are a terrible idea these days, a lot of people still have them kicking
around. What we're going to do is we are going to open Electrum on our phone
and we are going to select that we want to import Bitcoin addresses or private
keys. Now on our phone we are going to click the camera and we are going to
scan the spend QR code, and we're going to say next.
We'll choose a pin code, for purpose of this video I'll just
choose 1-2-3-4-5-6 and there we go. So this is what we're going
to see. So balance is just gonna say it's off line, send isn't really gonna show us
much and if we're going to receive what we will see is the address on the paper
wallet, but that is all we're going to see. So we're going to do is we're going
to open Electrum on our PC and that we can call the wallet whatever we like, we
can just plot paper wallet in this case, and we are going to say next. Now we want
to import a Bitcoin address or private keys and say next. What we're going to do
at this stage is we are going to import the Bitcoin address and the easiest way
to do that is just to click read the QR code and I've actually already got the
received tab open in Electrum, and I'm just going to show it that. We can just
delete that prefix ,because we're not actually trying to receive funds.
There's the address right there. At this point, you can hold up your paper wallet
to the camera, you just want to make sure you're covering up the private key,
because your computer at no point in this process needs to ever see the spend
part of the wallet. So we're gonna say next, we're not going to worry about a
password because we're just going to use this wallet as a one-time thing. We
saw that message there saying that we have a watch only wallet which means we
can't use this to send transactions on its own. We can see the funds that
are there, and in this example I only just deposited those funds a few minutes
ago and set the fees really low so it hasn't confirmed yet, but that doesn't
matter. What you will see here is all the balances and transactions where you
deposited into your paper wallet. So we are going to go into send, and what we're
going to do is we're going to type in the Bitcoin address that we're going to
send the funds to, so this is all happening on the PC. We want to set our
fees and look in this example I'm just going to set the fees at one sat/byte
just because I move a lot of crypto around for these sort of videos I
don't want to spend tons on fees but this is a situation where it is worth
having it confirmed within a few blocks. So you'll need to set the fee we're
going to say max because we want to sweep the full balance of the wallet and
now what we do is we hit preview. What we can see here is this transaction,
but see it is unsigned, because this computer doesn't have the private keys
on there to be able to sign the transaction. So what we're going to do is
we're going to click this QR button right here and that QR code now has all
of the information that is the transaction. So now we go to our phone
that has Electrum on it, and if we click on the send tab you'll notice there's a
little camera icon, so if we press that it'll start up our camera and we can
scan that QR code from our PC. What we can see is exactly the same
transaction from a PC on our phone. What we can do then is we can confirm
that things like the amount that we're sending and the output, that is the
destination the funds are being sent to, matches where it should be going. So this is the
step where if you're sending this to like a hardware wallet or something like
that, you'd be making sure this address you see on your phone and the amount,
matches exactly the address on your hardware wallet, because any malware
that's going to try and send your funds somewhere else is probably going to do
that by adding a different output here. Either sending all your funds to
the scammers address, or something like that. So what we can do is we can say
options, and then we can say sign. Now we're gonna put in the pin, which for
this case I just said is 1-2-3-4-5-6 and there you go. So what we
have now in our offline phone is a signed transaction and so we're going to
click the QR code icon. Then back in our computer we're going to close that
transaction we've created or we're gonna say spools load transaction from QR code.
We are going to show it the QR code that we had signed on the device and
again this is another opportunity to just double check and make sure that all
the details are correct and if we're happy with that we can say broadcast.
There we go the payment is sent. So if we go into the transaction history now we
can see that it has sent the transaction and upon our computer we go to a Block
Explorer, we'll actually be able to see that that address now has a
transaction sweeping the funds out. At this point you're gonna want to make sure
your transaction has at least one confirmation before you go reconnecting
your phone to the internet, and if you want to you can also not only
remove the wallet from Electrum but you can also just uninstall Electrum
completely. But even after you've deleted your wallet and uninstalled Electrum, you
want to keep your phone off-line and air-gapped until that transaction has at least
one confirmation, because after that it doesn't actually matter if someone has
your private key anymore there are no funds there for them to steal. So there
you go if you're someone who had used a BIP 38 passphrase on your paper wallet
like if you'd use bitaddress.org that often makes them look blue like this an easy
way to tell is if your private key starts with a six not with an L then you
will need to use two computers for this because you will need to decrypt that
private key before you can sweep it into electrum and what you'll need to do is
download bitaddress on to that second computer the one that's going to go
offline as well as electrum and then you'll need to take that computer
offline and only then import your private key into bit address offline on
that computer decrypt the private key and then import that private key into
Electrum and then from then on the process is the same as what I've showed
you except again either juggling QR scanning on your laptops or just passing
the transaction backwards and forwards using a USB stick. The other thing I'll add is
if you have altcoins like you know like Litecoin or if your private key is old
enough that you want to be sweeping things like Bitcoin cash off there as
well, you will need to use two computers for that step, just because the Electron-Cash
version on Android for whatever reason, has had the support for offline
signing like this removed from it and there simply isn't an Android version of
Electrum-LTC available right now if you want a bit of a practice for doing this
with your actual paper wallet private key
I definitely recommend just you know downloading Electrum on your PC
downloading it on your phone and then just practicing with a private key that you
generate specifically for this. Just generate a new paper wallet to send
a dollar there and just practice sending that back and forwards a few times just
so you're comfortable with how to do this process as long as
you know it get so comfortable you forget to take the device offline before
importing your private key thanks for watching I hope that was helpful
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