A paper wallet is a printed private key and the address it controls, usually as two QR codes with text underneath. It was made to survive without a computer. Then the paper sat in a drawer, a basement or a safe-deposit box, and now it is stained, creased, torn, faded or partly burned. Or the paper is fine and the problem is what happened when you tried to use it: the coins went to the wrong place, only part of the balance moved, or the wallet you imported it into shows zero.
This guide covers both cases. It is about recovering access to coins that sit under a key you hold on paper. It does not cover funds that were already sent to a scammer's address.
What is actually on the paper
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Most Bitcoin paper wallets print two things:
- A public address, which anyone can see and send to. It starts with 1, 3 or bc1.
- A private key, which spends the coins. In the common Wallet Import Format (WIF), an older uncompressed key starts with 5 and a compressed key starts with K or L, and the key is 51 or 52 characters of text (Bitcoin Wiki: Wallet import format).
Some paper wallets use an encrypted key instead. A key that begins with 6P is a BIP38 encrypted key and needs its passphrase (BIP 38). If yours starts with 6P, damage is only one of your two problems, and the passphrase search is covered further down.
Other paper backups are not paper wallets in this sense. A printed 12 or 24 word list is a seed phrase backup, so use the seed phrase recovery route instead.
Rule one: do not scan the key into anything yet
A private key on paper has never touched a network. That is its whole value. The moment you type it into a website, photograph it with a cloud-synced phone or paste it into a chat, you have given up that property.
- Do not upload a photo of the key to any site, forum or support chat, including ours.
- Do not type it into a website that offers to "check the balance", "repair" or "convert" a key.
- If you need to photograph a fragile sheet to preserve it, do it with a device that is offline or has photo sync turned off, and delete the photo after.
You can check whether coins are still there without the key. Paste the public address into a block explorer. The address is safe to share.
Step 1: protect the paper
Paper that has been wet or burned gets worse every time you handle it.
- Wet paper: let it dry flat, on a clean absorbent surface, away from heat. Do not peel layers apart or iron it. Paper with thermal-printer ink may fade for good, so photograph it (offline) before it dries if you can.
- Torn paper: keep every piece. A fragment that looks blank can carry the middle of a code.
- Burned paper: do not brush the ash. Move it onto a rigid flat support by sliding a card underneath, and photograph it where it lies.
- Faded thermal print: keep it out of light and heat, and away from plastic sleeves that can lift the ink.
Take sharp, flat, well-lit photographs from straight above, with a ruler or coin in frame for scale. Offline.
Step 2: read what you can
You usually have three chances to get the key back, because most designs print it more than once.
The text key. Read it character by character under good light. The key is Base58Check encoded, which means the last four bytes are a checksum. A reader can tell that a candidate is a valid key or a typo. Confusable characters are the usual damage: Base58 leaves out 0, O, I and l to reduce this, but smudging still turns a 5 into an S or a 1 into a 7.
The QR code. QR codes carry built-in error correction. At the highest level, a code can still be read with up to roughly 30 percent of it damaged (QR code error correction, Denso Wave). A stained or creased QR is therefore often readable by a phone camera or a scanner, even when the text beside it is not. Scan it with an offline app and compare the result with the printed text.
The address, as a cross-check. If you have a candidate key, a wallet can derive its address and you compare it with the public address on the sheet. If they match, the key is right.
What a checksum can repair, and what it cannot
If only one or two characters are unreadable, the missing key can sometimes be rebuilt by trying the possible characters and keeping only candidates whose checksum passes, then confirming against the printed address. With one unknown character there are 58 candidates. With two there are about 3,400. Both are trivial for a computer.
The number grows by a factor of 58 for each further unknown character. Past a handful of unknown characters the search is no longer small, and you need other information (a second copy of the key, a QR code that still scans, the address on the sheet) to narrow it. This is arithmetic, not a promise: whether a particular sheet can be rebuilt depends on which characters survived. Recovery odds by scenario explains how to think about it.
Do this work offline, on a computer that is not online and with software you trust. A key-repair tool you do not control is a key you have disclosed.
Step 3: if the key starts with 6P
A BIP38 key is encrypted, and the encryption is deliberately slow to guess, so a search is only practical when you remember something about the passphrase. The method is the same as for any forgotten password: build candidates from your own habits, and test them offline. Ideas for remembering a forgotten password shows how to mine your own habits before spending computing time. If you remember nothing about it, say so honestly when you ask for help, because that changes the odds.
The other half: mistakes when redeeming a paper wallet
A sheet in perfect condition can still go wrong at the redeem step. The common failures:
Importing instead of sweeping. There are two ways to move coins off a paper key. Importing adds the key to a wallet that keeps it. Sweeping sends the whole balance to an address your wallet already controls, and leaves the paper key empty (Bitcoin Wiki: Paper wallet). Sweeping is the safer choice, because the old key stops being something that matters. Once a printed key has been typed into an online device, treat it as exposed.
Spending only part of the balance. A Bitcoin transaction spends whole outputs, and anything not sent to the recipient must come back as change. Software that is not written for paper wallets may not send the change anywhere you can reach, and an unplanned change output can end up as a very large fee. Sweep the full balance in one transaction, then spend from your new wallet.
Wrong network, wrong coin. A key is just a number, and the same number can control coins on other chains. Bitcoin Cash split from Bitcoin on 1 August 2017, so a key that held coins before that date also controls the forked coins, and a wallet for one chain will show nothing for the other. The reverse mistake is sending coins to an address of the wrong type. Check the coin and the address prefix before you press send. The same wrong-chain trap is described in Bitcoin Core restored but no balance.
An imported key that shows zero. Newer wallet software may not accept an imported private key at all, or may need a rescan to find old coins. Look at the address on a block explorer first. If the explorer shows a balance and your wallet shows none, the key and the coins are fine and the wallet needs a rescan or the right import method.
A funded key that has been exposed. Bots watch the network for known compromised keys and move coins the instant they appear. If a key has been shown to a website or photographed to the cloud and the coins are still there, speed matters. The hacked wallet rescue page describes how that situation works and its limits. It cannot bring back coins that have already left.
Do not do these
- Do not pay anyone who contacts you first. Offers that turn up under forum and social posts are the standard recovery scam. How to tell a legitimate recovery service from a scam is the checklist.
- Do not send the key in a first message to anyone, including a support form. You do not need to.
- Do not trust a "paper wallet generator" you did not verify, and do not make a new paper wallet from a website. A generator that runs online can keep a copy of the key it gives you.
- Do not throw the damaged sheet away after you have restored the funds. Keep it until the coins are confirmed in a new wallet with a new backup.
When to get help
If the sheet is damaged and the key cannot be read, if the key is BIP38 encrypted and you remember part of the passphrase, or if a redeem attempt left you unsure where the coins are, describe what you have: which coin, roughly when the paper wallet was made, how it is damaged, and whether the key starts with 5, K, L or 6P. Leave out the key itself.
The assessment is free, the pricing is published, and there is no fee until your crypto is back. Start from the forgotten wallet password recovery or corrupt wallet file recovery page, whichever is closer to your situation.